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gbaji's right, almost.

Intelligent design in nature is entirely unfalsifiable. There's no way to prove it wrong, so it's not scientific.

Intelligent design should be taught in a philosophy of science class, but never in a science class. When Newton reached the limits of his findings and theories, he said that anything further was in the realm of God and unsolvable. This is just intelligent design in another setting.

As for calling evolution unprovable in the same sense that intelligent design is unprovable, I think you're vastly mistaken in your understanding of evolution.

Edited, Nov 29th 2010 6:53pm by LeWoVoc

I did in middle school. Hell, most science museum will at least have a sample tree with the explaination, it's not a very hard topic to explain and it's fairly important to understanding basic biology

Edited, Nov 29th 2010 11:11pm by shintasama

That's not what I'm talking about. That's not the "science" of evolutionary theory any more than a poster showing biological features which could not have developed randomly is the science of ID. That's someone telling you "this is how all of these things are connected. Just trust us that it's true". It is unlikely that any student will *ever* actually become involved in the actual science involved until into a post-graduate biology program. Up until that point, it's really just someone telling you what to assume is true based upon the adoption of current theory.


Again, I'm not saying that this is at all the wrong way to teach science fundamentals, but let's not think for a moment that we're actually teaching "science" there. About the only science any kids actually learn in high school are in chemistry and physics, where they're actually doing their own experiments and deriving equations that match real world outcomes. Everything else is just memorization out of a book. Even dissection in biology class relies on you just accepting someone else's explanation about what that organ does, or what that part of a cell is for, etc.


The fact that something is accepted doesn't make it "science". It's the process of discovery that does. What you're doing in most science classes isn't actual science. It's just memorizing the conclusions that other people have derived. It's kinda important to make note of that in the context of a discussion like this. It's the one valid point that the ID folks do have. We could literally just replace existing sections teaching evolution with those teaching ID, and to the students taking those classes one would be just as valid as the other. Said students would be just as sure that anyone suggesting that animals "evolved" over time were wacky fringe people who were ignoring what science shows to be true.


Just pointing out that perception is somewhat circular here, though. Nothing more.

Except not, because there are tons of easy to explain examples that don't make sense with ID (ex- giraffe neck nerves). I'm confused as to what you think teachers need to show to demonstrate the "actual science" of evolution? and how that's different from your example of chemistry?

Edited, Nov 29th 2010 11:52pm by shintasama

Ok. I thought you quoted me when you said it, but whatever. My point was that what makes something a valid "science" is that scientific method can be used on it. Scientific method never proves anything, and anyone who says it does doesn't understand science. All science can do is test something to see if it's false.

Since scientific method deals with testing something to see if it's false, then the only things we can say are valid scientific subjects must involve those things which can be tested using scientific method. In other words, if there's no way to test something to see if it's wrong, then it can't be a scientific theory/law/hypothesis/whatever. What makes something an accepted scientific theory is that it matches the conditions we see around us, can be tested, and has been tested and thus far has not failed a test. Thus, it's not that evolution has been "proved" that makes it the leading scientific theory on that subject, but that it has not yet been "disproved".


Similarly, this is why creation myths are not science (generally). If my answer to any test is to say that "god made it that way", then there's no test I can perform to disprove the theory. Thus, it's *not* a scientific theory. It's just something some people believe.


I bring this up because it's important not to make the same mistake with regard to evolution. Moe is right to a point that if every time someone pokes a hole in the theory, you just change things or ignore them, then what you're doing isn't science either. I think sometimes people get so caught up in the "evolution vs creationism" argument that they use similarly flawed arguments in favor of evolution. The reality is that there is no single "theory of evolution", despite that it's often referred to that way. It's a whole set of different theories about different aspects of the whole. Broadly, we can talk about evolution being a general set of theory, but at that broad level, it's pretty useless as a theory. Again, it has to be able to be tested. If your theory is so broad that you can adjust it to match any discrepancy in the data, then it's not really a very useful theory.


I really do suspect that much of this is more about faith (on both sides) than about the actual science.

When you understand the difference between small "t" theories and big "T" Theories, come back and try posting again.

no, that's not how scientific disprovability works at all.

If all you want is a Mendel style example then you could easily show it with fish (have done in middle school), bacteria (have done in HS/do on a regular basis), fruit flies (how my dad did it), or plants (how my brother did it). It's not any different from your chemistry example at all. Doing a high school chemistry experiment you may see things change colors or burst into flames or w/e, but you're still basing the reasons they did those things on tons of other experimental data, books, and other materials presented to you covering lifetimes of careful study as opposed to "God must have commanded they be like that".

You're right there, but it depends on your definition of macroevolution. We are forced to rely on evidence from the past to form the past, of course, but as far as speciation goes (which is what I've found most to be talking about when they use "macroevolution"), it can and has been tested.

ID as a principle can't be disproved, but in practice, it's easily disproved. This is because 99.99% of people who accept ID do so under the premise of their own religion, and under the premise of their own religious texts and dogma. These texts frequently fail to line up with scientific observation (e.g., a layered fossil record vs. the biblical history of animals), leaving the only plausible ID an ambiguous creator that no one explicitly worships anyway, making ID irrelevant. Considering ID is a tool for the validation of religion, rather than an end to itself, actual ID theories are more useless than the male nipple.

As for the universe, it's tricky business. Science depends upon observation, but as humans we have limited powers of perception. There could be thousands of particles at play in everyday physics completely outside the realm of possibility that we will EVER be able to detect them. And the universe is theoretically endless-- the universe as we know it may simply be one of a trillion other universes as some other intelligent lifeforms know theirs. It's automatically fallacious to assume that the observable universe is the entirety of existence, stemming from a lone singularity. Ours could merely be an explosion born from two universes eventually gravitating towards one another until colliding. We have absolutely no concept of scale, and when science is forced to ignore the entirety of the context in which the thing it is studying is set, it can scarcely be called science. Observing changing states in physics are the basis for all science, and hypothesizing about the unobservable is not. The creation of the universe is such an insanely macroscopic event that until we can witness the creation of other universes, we will never be able to call astronomical theories science.

All that is not to say that an educated guess isn't much better than nothing, or that hypothesizing is useless.

Edited, Nov 29th 2010 11:08pm by Kachi

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/aug/HQ_06297_CHANDRA_Dark_Matter.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090312093947.htm

It's not so simple as a cop-out tactic. It's a real phenomenon, but the details are sketchy. Certain creation myths can be discounted, though. I'm not sure why you think otherwise.

1. Carbon dating wouldn't even enter into this argument. Rock layers wouldn't settle the way they do by period during a flood, nor would it account for the finding of aquatic animals specific to their period.

2. If based on the accounts of genesis, God's timeline is irrelevant (nevermind that this argument doesn't fly with literalists), because it doesn't resolve the paleontological findings in light of the statements that man and animal lived at the same time (nevermind that it gives different orders for the way things transpired in the very same book; e.g., beasts then birds, no wait... or, light and dark, then the sun and moon).

3. Eh, maybe? I've never heard the "God invented other planets with other animals first, then killed them to make our planet," theory, but that's about as magical an explanation as I've ever heard, and quite a stretch of the story of creation.

And honestly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone with more knowledge of geology/paleontology could discredit that argument easily. I mean, for it to have been multiple earths, that's an interesting way to build a planet. I would think an intelligent designer could do much better.

Proving creation myths "wrong" falls into the problem of proving a negative. I can present a million pieces of evidence against a creation story and still get "God did it that way to test our faith" and other non-answer cop outs.

More importantly, there aren't any creation/ID stories that have evidence supporting them as the most plausible reason for why things are what they are. Not having all the answers yet regarding evolution or the cosmos doesn't mean that "God musta done it" is an equally valid suggestion without anything else backing it up.