Damn Creationists. You've got no place in science, you bastards.
Anonymous
07:09:00 PM
9/02/2008
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8 comments:
Before you bash Creationism in schools, consider this:
Evolution, unlike any other scientific discipline, has ZERO predictive power.
In that sense, it is no different than Creationism.
really creationism can go hand in hand with evolution, try to keep an open mind.
Evolution and Creationism have no predictive power.
However, evolution has great reflective perspective, and accounts for many things that Christianity shoves under the heading of "God's mysterious ways".
However, evolution has great reflective perspective, and accounts for many things that Christianity shoves under the heading of "God's mysterious ways".
So do many forms of philosophy. But they're still taught in schools. Just playing the devil's advocate.
Philosophy is not a science, and it is not masqueraded as such.
Creationism pretends to be a solid alternative for science. It's absolutely appropriate to include Creationism where you would the study of other philosophies, like an AP World History class, for example.
Creationism is inappropriate for inclusion in a scientific curriculum.
^Agreed. Creationism a legitimate religious philosophy, but it isn't really a valid scientific theory. With Creationism, you start with the answers you want to get and look for evidence to support it. In science, you might have a hypothesis to begin with, but you let the evidence inform your conclusion rather than the other way around.
Sorry. What I meant was that still, evolution still provides no predictive power, which makes it inappropriate to teach in the schools. Predictive power is necessary to fulfill the scientific definition of "theory", and since evolution does not satisfy that condition, it cannot be considered a theory. By saying that it merits consideration because of its reflective power, you are effectively putting evolution in the same boat as philosophy, which does not pass itself off as science.
I'm not arguing that Creationism should be taught in schools, I'm arguing that either creationism and evolutionism be taught as philosophies rather than scientific theories or neither be taught at all.
"The difference in predictive power between evolution and other sciences is one of degree, not kind. All theories are simplifications; they purposely neglect as many outside variables as they can. But these extraneous variables do affect predictions. For example, you can predict the future position of an orbiting planet, but your prediction will be off very slightly because you can not consider the effects of all the small bodies in the solar system. Evolution is more sensitive to initial conditions and extraneous factors, so specific predictions about what mutations will occur and what traits will survive are impractical. It is still possible to use evolution to make general predictions about the future, though. For example, we can predict that diseases will become resistant to any new widely used antibiotics.
The predictive power of science comes from being able to say things we would not have been able to say otherwise. These predictions do not have to be about things happening in the future. They can be "retrodictions" about things from the past that we have not found yet. Evolution allows innumerable predictions of this sort.
Evolution has been the basis of many predictions. For example:
Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa. That prediction has been supported by fossil and genetic evidence (Ingman et al. 2000).
Theory predicted that organisms in heterogeneous and rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates. This has been found in the case of bacteria infecting the lungs of chronic cystic fibrosis patients (Oliver et al. 2000).
Predator-prey dynamics are altered in predictable ways by evolution of the prey (Yoshida et al. 2003).
Ernst Mayr predicted in 1954 that speciation should be accompanied with faster genetic evolution. A phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction (Webster et al. 2003).
Several authors predicted characteristics of the ancestor of craniates. On the basis of a detailed study, they found the fossil Haikouella "fit these predictions closely" (Mallatt and Chen 2003).
Evolution predicts that different sets of character data should still give the same phylogenetic trees. This has been confirmed informally myriad times and quantitatively, with different protein sequences, by Penny et al. (1982).
Insect wings evolved from gills, with an intermediate stage of skimming on the water surface. Since the primitive surface-skimming condition is widespread among stoneflies, J. H. Marden predicted that stoneflies would likely retain other primitive traits, too. This prediction led to the discovery in stoneflies of functional hemocyanin, used for oxygen transport in other arthropods but never before found in insects (Hagner-Holler et al. 2004; Marden 2005).
With predictions such as these and others, evolution can be, and has been, put to practical use in areas such as drug discovery and avoidance of resistant pests.
If evolution's low power to make future predictions keeps it from being a science, then some other fields of study cease to be sciences, too, especially archeology and astronomy."
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