Recently, I have been awestruck by the statement of one of the “reputable” regulars at TSZ that evolutionary theory doesn’t need to be subjected to any experimental testing or experimental verification…
How do you like that?
He erroneously used the famous experiment that verified Einstein’s prediction of gravity’s ability to bend light. Here are the details:
See? Experiments don’t need to be run in the lab, and they can still be valid experiments.
While this kind of statement is nothing new to me that Darwinists deny or ignore the need for the experimental verification of their evolutionary claims, on the other hand, they demand ID to be subjected to the scientific method processes for their claims to be verified…Hypocrisy at its best…
So, why can’t evolution be tested?
For those who are not well familiarized with the scientific method, it is probably a good idea to review some of the requirements of the scientific theory, or hypothesis, just to realize what an impossible task Darwinists would face even if they would like to verify their evolutionary speculations by experiments… While the definitions of the scientific method vary slightly depending on where you look, most scientific methods of a theory or a hypothesis need to meet the 3 main criteria:
- It needs to be observable (one kind of animal evolving into another: organs in transition, the third hand evolving to hold the cellphone while I’m driving)
- It needs to make accurate predictions (If we tweak this gene this is going to begin to evolve, such as a change the body plans from 5 pound land walking animal to 50 ton whale)
- It needs to be replicated by experiments (bacteria without a flagellum put under selective pressure to evolve something resembling a flagellum or a propeller…
Anyone who has been following TSZ and my OPs knows that my calling on the supporters of evolution to help their belief system to meet the criteria of a scientific theory or scientific hypothesis is not new… The public admission by some that evolution doesn’t need to be subjected to experimental testing reached the new, unacceptable levels of ignorance by Darwinists, especially in the view of their arrogant insistence that ID would be subjected to experimental testing to be proven as a scientific theory or hypothesis…
Darwinists either don’t know, or choose not to know, but if they subjected evolution to experimental testing they could prove their theory or hypothesis right and, at the same time, ID wrong…
So, why not do it?
I guess the only explanation for the phenomenon is that Darwinists have not much faith in their own beliefs… It is just used as a facade to make their s”intelligence” look less ludicrous…
Evolution can be tested. The results are underwhelming.
Seriously? That makes me sad.
It really depends on what aspect you want to do an experiment on. If it takes even 100 years, you’d be a bit stumped. In that instance, you have to go for analysis of the data, rather than direct experiment. That’s still a test. There must be some phenomena that are both real and can’t be reproduced in a lab, for reasons of size, economics, historicity, complexity or stochasticity.
Taking this bizarre, but very common view (cue Ann Gauger in a lab coat), whole fields – eg geology, astrophysics – are outside of science. The aim, of course, is essentially to promote the view ‘your explanatory framework is as shit as mine’. Yay! Fist pump for the Feeble Frameworks!
Evolutionary theory can explain why you are sad. That should make you happy.
Thank you, scientist.
Well since he didn’t actually say that, I’d like for you to stop perpetrating falsehoods.
And he’s absolutely right of course, that an experiment doesn’t need to be run in a room in a building that someone decided to label as a “laboratory”.
Well since for mysterious reasons the predictions of ID are always the same as the predictions for evolution, we are forced to conclude that the tests of ID are equally underwhelming.
I can paraphrase phoodoo here: For some reason the designer seems to have stopped designing when we are looking. All the Big Designs seems to have taken place, mysteriously, in a progressive fashion, in the ancient geological past. Shouldn’t the E coli in Lenski’s experiment have been magically turned into a Gorilla or Dinosaur by now? Where are the experiments that show the designer magically zapping something “new” into existence, like a “new” limb or organ, or “new” genetic information?
Polar bears haven’t been magically guided by the invisible hand of
GodThe Designer to become whales yet. When can we expect him to intervene, to “make his move” and cause particular mutations to happen and ensure the continued adaptation and persistence of the much expected polarbear-whale? And pigs have still not been granted wings, as we have been consistently taunted haven’t evolved. Well it doesn’t seem to have been magically conjured into existence either. Disappointing as that is.When was the last time an experiment showed the designer magically make eyes appear on some sightless worm? He always seems to work exclusively with already existing “standing genetic variation” in a population. Those peppered moths that were black, they already existed in the mostly white moth population during the industrial revolution, so nothing “new” was created. The genes for blackness already existed. We can only ever be shown micro-creation, never any macro-creation. Why is that?
When should we expect the next big “virtually overnight” Cambrian explosion of new animal phyla the Designer has in store? Don’t tell me he’s stopped creating anything altogether, and that all the true tests of actions happened in the past beyond our ability to test them.
Can Intelligent Design be tested?
We can observe niches changing in real time around us. When will the designer help the polar bear survive it’s changing environment?
This is your misunderstanding of science.
We cannot verify singular events. What we test, experimentally, is the effectiveness of the methods used in that particular science.
It’s actually somewhat amusing to see someone so committed to the distinction between “observational science” and “historical science” that they end up saying (in effect): “look, just because speciation has been observed in species that reproduce so quickly that multiple population changes can be observed by human beings, it doesn’t follow that speciation could happen in species that reproduce more slowly, relative to human beings!”
Of course! Venter, Ekkehard Lönnig, and many others have spent most of their lives on the experiments that failed to prove that evolution could be considered a scientific theory or hypothesis…
The question still remains: If evolution failed to be experimentally verified, why is it portrayed as if it was a fact?
DNA-Jock accused me that this OP of mine:
“…misrepresents other posters here, and ascribes nefarious motives to them….
My another question still remains: Isn’t it wrong, or even evil, to present to the mainly uneducated public evolution as a fact if it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory or hypothesis?
The sense of justice not only drives me to expose this wrong, but more so, it tells that this fundamental aspect of moral personality of mine couldn’t have evolved…
Citation please.
What experiment is this?
Where did this take place?
Because that is the conclusion from geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, development, and genetics. 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.
But it does qualify as a scientific theory.
As Rumraket implies (by citing Doug Theobald’s conpilation of evidence) the consilience of evolutionary trees from different parts of the genome is powerful evidence for common descent. In history, biologists started suspecting common descent when they saw evidence from different parts of the phenotype supporting the same patterm of relationship.
When we go to a new region of the genome and look to see whether the phylogeny inferred there is very similar to that inferred elsewhere, is that an “experiment”? It is certainly new evidence. Similarly in astronomy we can look at different parts of the universe to see whether our theories on planetary orbits holds up, or our theories on planetary geology or solar astrophysics.
Apparently some people don’t recognize this as evidence, and don’t believe that, say, whales evolved unless we can see them doing it in a giant aquarium.
That wouldn’t work either, that would obviously the work of The Designer since evolution is supposed to take long periods of time. Catch 22.
I think we don’t need to repeat the 5,000-comment thread again, one in which creationists refused to acknowledge that consilience of evolutionary trees was evidence for common ancestry. I use the label “creationists” instead of “ID advocates” as their position is not an ID argument but old-fashioned creationism.
Yes, it is an experiment.
I invite anyone who disagrees with my assessment of this OP, viz “misrepresents other posters here, and ascribes nefarious motives” to make their case.
And I’d like a brand new 34-ft sailboat.
Joe Felsenstein,
Or don’t think the evidence is strong enough to support the extraordinary claim being made.
Whereas, of course, you have sufficient evidence for your claims of design of human beings, atoms and the very universe!
It must be galling then that your vague mish-mash of ideas and quantum woo has failed to gain traction in the major universities. Beaten by something that nobody can even show to be scientific!
DNA_Jock,
How well does the selected experiment do at validating the hypothesis? An experiment that validates a flying object can travel 1000 ft above the earths surface does not validate that the object can reach the moon. It is certainly evidence for the hypothesis but falls short of validation.
As similar strand of DNA between a land dwelling animal and a whale does not verify direct descent yet it is evidence supporting the hypothesis. Whether it is convincing depends on the observer.
What evolutionists have done is take troubling data, relabel it as a feature and claim it is evidence. Convergent evolution is an example. This tactic has damaged credibility in my opinion as I discuss this with neutral observers.
Can you give some specific examples?
What about convergent evolution is troubling? Can you be specific?
What is the truth behind convergent evolution? How does Intelligent Design explain it?
Can you give an example of something that is held up as an example of convergent evolution and give a better explanation? The true Intelligent Design explanation?
What would we expect sharks and dolphins to look like without Intelligent Design?
So DNA tests don’t work? What is “direct descent”? Can you define that?
Would we expect similar strands of DNA between everything anyway if Intelligent Design was true? Or is this where the “dependency graph” comes in? You get to handwave away all the physical evidence and re-interpretent in such a way that it supports design. Good luck with that!
colewd,
Oh dear, here we go again. The only reason we know a feature is convergent is that it sticks out from the phylogenetic pattern. The things that Creationists fondly and repetitiously imagine destroy evolution depend upon evolution’s overarching pattern for detection. But let’s pretend there’s no pattern, only anomaly, an absurd notion if thought through.
And of course, when we look at the genes for the convergent feature, we find they nest almost invariably with the rest of the genome, in the clade the rest of the body points to.
I say ‘almost’ because someone is bound to triumphantly play the ‘echolocation’ card, as if the handful of bits there destroys all other consilience, and we are rendered utterly stumped as to the proper placement of bats and whales.
OMagain,
Convergent evolution is from wiki:
Where common descent is logical is when a feature is passed down from one generation to another. We know this mechanism works empirically. The appearance of complex adaptions like the eye are difficult to explain happening once where in this case the adaption has to be produced more than once.
In my opinion it is very strong evidence for the design hypothesis.
In my opinion they would not exist.
OMagain,
In my view this is exactly what evolutionists do like in the case of convergent evolution.
Allan Miller,
Or the eye card etc etc. At what point do you say were rowing the boat in the wrong direction? 🙂
OMagain,
They are working fine but not how you want them to work.http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/article01036.html
So if only fish were streamlined, that could be evolution. But if fish and dolphins are streamlined, it’s design and evolutionists handwave away the evidence?
Can’t streamlining be beneficial, and achieved through multiple pathways? If it’s not beneficial, why bother designing it?
I don’t remember having seen anyone even do a phylogeny that places bats and whales together. I think I saw a pairwice distance showing one particular gene had a handful of homoplasious residues. It’s still not clear to me that this actually yields an incongruence (irrelevant though it would be). Anyone remember the papers?
Bill, will there come some future time where signs that the concept of taxon sample density and diveristy is starting to be transparent to you, or do I entertain this hope in vain?
The genes involved in the variant eyes fit neatly into the clade the rest of the organism’s features fit in. Insect eyes don’t make us wonder if they might be vertebrates. There is virtually no convergence at the genetic level – the level of which Creationists here seem quite heroically determined to remain ignorant. Which is why I mentioned echolocation; there is a small genetic anomaly, which is not the case for the generality of convergent features.
A search of Creationist sites would be the quickest route, I think! They don’t get these arguments by themselves.
Allan Miller,
I got it. You don’t think there is enough noise in the data to make the hypothesis troubling. I think the genetic data is surfacing more noise all the time that is evident in Ewerts dependency graph. Thats what creates an interesting discussion 🙂
Allan Miller,
Where I have a problem with evolutionists credibility is when noise in the data is spun to become signal.:-)
Allan Miller,
Do you think this evidence makes the data more or less noisy?
Evolution finds a different genetic sequence to build and eye in almost infinite mathematical space.
Well at least you have you have progressed to understanding that it is noise instead of anti-signal.
You forgot to mention that Theobal’s evidence is a powerful, speculative evolutionary science. It might be “bald” but in the end it is”Theo-ry”… 🤣
Isn’t Lenski’s experiment the equivalent of millions of years of evolution in humans?
Let me make some predictions: bacteria are still bacteria and they still use the same genetic code… 😂
How many trees are there? You mean more than one evolutionary tree?
I guess you are referring to the phylogenetic forests that evolutionists have been talking about lately and creationists have at least tried to bring them to your attention, right?
It’s interesting that J-Mac failed to notice that my post was exactly the opposite of what (s)he claims it to be. Maybe (s)he needs to re-read this part:
I don’t see anything there saying that evolution is not subject to experimental verification. Maybe J-Mac has a hard time reading for comprehension. A profound problem since (s)he linked to it in the OP.
Poor J-Mac is also wrong about what example I used for other theories tested out of the lab. I wasn’t referring to Probe B, but to a test in the early 1900s, which I described this way:
So, pretending to contradict my point, J-Mac shoot her/himself in the foot by talking about yet another example that experimental testing is not limited to the laboratory!
So, there you have it. J-Mac wanted to shoot her/himself in the foot in a more comprehensive manner, thus the OP.
You just pretend there is no signal. The problem is that what you see as ‘noise’ cannot be identified as such without the ground of a signal. It can’t all be anomaly.
But more pertinently, at the genetic level, the things you see as ‘noise’ are actually signal. The genes for fly eyes follow the same phylogeny as the rest of the fly. Ditto for vertebrates.
Less. We don’t need to look at morphology at all; we have a clear digital signal we can use instead.
So what?
Allan Miller,
Interesting response 🙂
It appears you are looking at some data and ignoring other data yet you only provide an assertion that this strategy is ok. So I think you maybe misleading yourself with poor methods.
Allan Miller,
So is this observation signal or noise relative to the common descent of fly and another insect from a common ancestor?
In an equal number of generations (~65.000) it’s about 1 million years.
So why hasn’t the designer created something “new”? Why hasn’t magic man turned them into elephants, dogs, or palm trees?
No, it doesn’t appear like that at all.
Allan Miller is spending his time trying to explain concepts to you, apparently to no avail.
You’d have to be specific before that can be answered. What genes are we looking at, what species of insects specifically? To assess whether some collection of data is evidence for, or against, or neutral with respect to some hypothesis, we’re going to need to see the actual data.
I don’t agree experiments are needed to ‘prove’ a hypothesis and so make a theory(solid conclusion).
Yet evolutionism has no experiments to prove itself becvause its not true?
What can you do with a untruth and then experiments??!
What they should say is past and gone processes and events can not have experiments on them. Well thats too bad but it would be that way whatever is true.
by the way i don’t agree Einsteins light bending was proved but rather only the movement of something that bumped into light. I don’t think light moves but is a perfect blanket in the universe. Genesis implies this. Einstein admitted he didn’t know what light was at the end of his life.
in fact its like evolutionism in that other options were not imagined.
Evolutionism convinces themselves of common design trees AS LONG as there are no other options for comparitiveness.