In
the first post I made about Bill Nye, I talked about his zealot-like
mission to proselytize young people into evolutionism. In the next
post, I discussed his fallacious claim that creationists can't be
good scientists. A frequent visitor to my blog, Steven J, took issue
with some examples and spent quite a bit of time trying to build the
case that there is a “broad acceptance” of evolution
within the scientific community. He later said, “The
broad shape of the tree of life is clear from fossils, comparative
anatomy, and comparative genomics, even if the exact detail of the
branchings is fuzzy in many cases. ”
It's
the “fuzzy details” that was kind of my point in my second post.
Of course there is a “broad acceptance” of evolution. Scientists
will all swear that everything has evolved even though they are a
little “fuzzy” about the details of how, where, and when. Please
tell me how practical any theory is to science when many of the
details are still “fuzzy.” Nye said, “There
are just things about evolution that we should all be aware of, the
way we’re aware of where electricity comes from.”
Really, Nye? You want us to think we can understand evolution the
way we understand electricity? “Science” isn't settled over how,
where, and when things evolved. If we had that same lack of
precision in how we understand electricity, we'd still be reading by
candlelight.
But
even if there were complete harmony among all scientists about every
point in evolution, it has still not been demonstrated how that
contributes to inventing life improving technologies. What would
happen if everyone was in agreement about evolution, then suddenly a
new fossil – like a rabbit found in the Cambrian – overturned it
all? Would airplanes start falling from the sky? Would buildings
collapse? Would bridges crumble? These are the kinds of things that
could happen if we were dead wrong in a real science like physics.
But what about evolution? What would happen if evolutionists were
shown to be 100% wrong on some point in their theory. I'll tell you
what would happen – a bunch of biologists would drop everything and
start running around, redrawing their cherished, nested hierarchy.
In the meantime, the rest of science might pause for a moment in
healthy curiosity but then would resume its work improving people's
lives. The average person wouldn't even notice. Evolution is just
that unimportant.
If
you ask me, I think it's a shame that we waste resources studying
evolution. If I were a philanthropist who gave millions of dollars
for research, I would demand the “scientist” provide me a
detailed explanation of how his research would contribute to society.
I don't want platitudes. I wouldn't accept a vague claim about how
such and such a find would help us understand how marine animals
transitioned to land. I want to know how that knowledge might
improve our lives. What can we do with it? All of evolution
research now just ends up in text books and published papers with no
real application in science. It's more like trivial pursuit than
research.
5 comments:
Would airplanes start falling from the sky? Would buildings collapse? Would bridges crumble? These are the kinds of things that could happen if we were dead wrong in a real science like physics.
Granted I only have history books to go by, but I don't recall reading of, e.g. the Colosseum disintegrating when it was discovered that, in fact, heavier objects did not fall faster than lighter ones. The Ponte Fabricio in Rome, a twenty-one century old bridge, continued to stand even when Newton's physics was supplanted by Einstein's and Heisenberg's. If we discovered tomorrow that the luminiferous aether was real after all, well, airplanes would have been flying for 111 years in spite of our mistake on that matter, and I see no reason why they should drop out of the sky in protest over our improved knowledge.
Successful theories make successful predictions. Some predictions are more useful at killing our enemies or making us rich than others, but obsession with how remunerative successful predictions are is the mark of a philistine more in love with lucre than with truth (okay, that's unfair in your case: a philistine more in love with dogma than with actual facts that might contradict it).
I've mentioned before that evolution predicts that the Devonian rocks that yielded Tiktaalik might yield such a transitional early tetrapod, but would not yield a more advanced tetrapod such as a marine reptile or whale. I suppose that won't help you get better gas mileage, but from a scientific point of view it's just as valid and falsifiable prediction as one that will. By the same token, predicting that a baboon will have a GULO pseudogene disabled the same way that of humans is (but not as similar in sequence as, e.g. the human and gorilla GULO pseudogenes) seems unlikely to yield stronger steel alloys. But it serves as well as confirmation of a theory.
The problem with scientists is that, from their point of view, the textbooks and published papers are the real applications; everything else is just the dressing on the salad.
If I were a philanthropist who gave millions of dollars for research, I would demand the “scientist” provide me a detailed explanation of how his research would contribute to society.
If you were such a philanthropist, I would pity the researchers forced to tell you that maybe all they'd have, when they'd spent your money, was a list of several dozen things that turn out not to work (cf. Edison's famous comment that now he knew a hundred ways not to make a light bulb). On the other hand, sometimes you find that something you regarded as a useless bit of trivia has, serendipitously, lucrative implications after all. You really don't get the point of looking for answers you don't already know, do you?
I assume, by the way, that you'd likewise advocate ending all funding for archaeology, history, paleontology (I assume you distinguish between that and evolution), and pretty much every other field of scholarship that doesn't contribute in immediate and obvious ways to technology and medicine. Bye-bye, biblical archaeology.
You said, “Granted I only have history books to go by, but I don't recall reading of, e.g. the Colosseum disintegrating when it was discovered that, in fact, heavier objects did not fall faster than lighter ones.”
OK. I concede we've been wrong in other areas of science as well but is that really the rebuttal you want to invoke? That physics, like evolution, doesn't really need to be all that accurate? It's hard to say exactly how far behind we'd be if the rest of science were as imprecise as evolution but I suspect I wouldn't be writing this on my laptop and posting it on the world wide web.
You said, “Successful theories make successful predictions.... I've mentioned before that evolution predicts that the Devonian rocks that yielded Tiktaalik might yield such a transitional early tetrapod, but would not yield a more advanced tetrapod such as a marine reptile or whale. I suppose that won't help you get better gas mileage, but from a scientific point of view it's just as valid and falsifiable prediction as one that will.”
I consider Tiktaalik to be a failed prediction. It was heralded for a while since scientists were specifically looking for marine-to-land transitions when they found Tiktaalik. However, I'm sure you're aware that fossil tetrapod footprints were found in Poland that were dated by evolutionary estimates to be 18 million years older than Tiktaalik. Since these belongs to a full-blown tetrapod, it means 4-legged terrestrial animals had already evolved millions of years EARLIER than the date evolutionists were “predicting” when they found Tiktaalik.
You said, “If you were such a philanthropist, I would pity the researchers forced to tell you that maybe all they'd have, when they'd spent your money, was a list of several dozen things that turn out not to work (cf. Edison's famous comment that now he knew a hundred ways not to make a light bulb).
That's not what I asked for. I could understand if research turns out to be for naught. But what were they hoping to accomplish. If Edison told me his goal was to invent an artificial means of light, I can see the practical applications of such a thing – even if he ultimately didn't achieve it.
You said, “On the other hand, sometimes you find that something you regarded as a useless bit of trivia has, serendipitously, lucrative implications after all. You really don't get the point of looking for answers you don't already know, do you?”
I understand that the man who invented velcro got the idea while picking burs off his pants and socks. Vaccinations were invented when live chickens were accidentally injected with a dead virus. I guess there are a lot of marvelous inventions that we've stumbled upon. I'm glad for it. I still would not give millions of dollars for research to someone who said, “I'm going to just try random things in a lab and see if something great happens.”
You said, “I assume, by the way, that you'd likewise advocate ending all funding for archaeology, history, paleontology (I assume you distinguish between that and evolution), and pretty much every other field of scholarship that doesn't contribute in immediate and obvious ways to technology and medicine. Bye-bye, biblical archaeology.”
Actually, I can see immediate applications in studying history and archeology. There were brilliant people who lived before us and there is value in learning things they said and did. I see less value in paleontology but not necessarily no value. Scientists are sometimes inspired to invent things that mimic designs we see in nature. There's no reason why extinct animals might not also have some wonderful structure that some clever inventor could mimic for our benefit.
Continue...
Absent from all your replies, though, was any attempt to demonstrate how evolution contributes one whit to science. Nye's claim was that we need to understand evolution the same way we understand something like electricity. Why?! He's concerned that kids being taught creation will produce a generation of poor scientists. His premise is a lie. If scientists want to study trivia, I really don't care. I do care that Nye is bent on proselytizing kids into evolutionism and persuading them away from their parents' beliefs under the false premise that it's the only way to insure the progress of technology.
I think we both expressed ourselves less well than might be hoped. My point, to be clearer (I hope) was that from a strictly scientific standpoint, it doesn't matter whether a test of a theory is practically relevant to most people (e.g. a successful airplane flight as a test of aerodynamic theories) or not (e.g. finding identical ERVs in homologous loci in humans and rhesus macaques); the point is that theory predicted something and a test which could have falsified it instead confirmed it.
You, on the other hand, probably did not mean that "Tiktaalik was a failed prediction" (Shubin predicted that a transitional fossil showing certain features would show up in certain rocks, and it did -- is that not the very epitome of successful prediction?). You meant that Tiktaalik did not distinguish between that prediction and several possible alternate predictions (e.g. that transitional fossils like Tiktaalik would show up in rocks 20 million years older, or that a more primitive transitional tetrapod -- a living fossil in its own time, like Tiktaalik, before it became a dead fossil, would show up where Tiktaalik did).
I note in passing that for someone so distrustful of human reason and evolutionary interpretations of fossils you are putting a lot of stock in a footprint and fallible human interpretations thereof. But that's just me being snarky: my actual point was, again, that Shubin didn't find, e.g. a fossil of Dorudon or Ichthyosaurus, and on your young-earth principles there's no reason he shouldn't have. True, if we're just discussing this one fossil, they might have existed in other parts of the planet, but their absence from every Devonian fossil site ever excavated is confirmation of the idea that they didn't exist when Devonian sediments were being laid down; the Earth is not a mere several thousand years old and all "kinds" did not coexist at any time. The young-earth creationist prediction is not one of the ones being confirmed by fossil finds.
For my own part, I think Nye prefers that evolution be taught because all the evidence we have indicates that it is true; emphasis on its supposed practical value is not his reason, but strictly for the benefits of people who see no other reason to be interested in knowledge. For my own part, I prefer Jerry Coyne's forthright admission that the practical, quotidian value of evolution is rather indirect and nebulous, like (my example, not his) the value of the Akkadian Pessimistic Dialogue (a work of some brilliant person discovered by archaeologists).
Steven J,
I consider Tiktaalik to be a failed prediction because scientists (you identified Shubin), acting upon their understanding of where and when marine-to-land evolution occurred, were looking for a marine-to-land transitional form in a certain place at a certain time. We learned later that not only were they wrong about the where and when, the find isn't even TRANSITIONAL since fully formed tetrapods already existed by evolutionary standards 18 million years earlier (meaning marine-to-land evolution had to have occurred still millions of years earlier than that). You can't really have the ancestor of tetrapods be younger than its descendents, can you? So not only were they wrong about what was predicted, they were wrong about what was found.
As for identifying the Poland tracks as “footprints,” I've said before that creationists don't deny evidence. I believe, for the most part, that fossils and trace fossils are real. Certainly, natural depressions in rocks have been mistaken for footprints and I always reserve the right to be skeptical but in this case, it is your cohorts that identified the footprints as belonging to a quadraped and being much older than Tiktaalik.
But enough of all that. Frankly, I'm disappointed that, after all your talk defending Nye (actually, you don't seem to defend Nye as much as simply argue with me), you haven't suggested any examples of how studying evolution is important. I would have thought you would at least attempt the often used examples like having to create new vaccines every year because viruses “evolve” or understanding how antibiotic-resistant bacteria “evolve.” Did you not think of these or did you not think there are very persuasive?
Oh well. Thanks for all of your comments on what has turned out to be a short series. I need to stop writing series. They always seem like a good idea when I start but then I get tired of them about half way through.
God bless!!
RKBentley
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