Creation vs. Evolution

[Bryan]

wow... that's state of the art scholarship

(fyi, there have been significant new discoveries regarding Lucy, the last one just a few weeks back, when a child belonging to the same "species" was discovered)

and yes, overwhelming scientific consensus is that Lucy and her kind represent a transition between more ape-like creatures and us.

also, Lucy was found on November, 1974. fragging fast work on that guy's part to be able to come up with his analysis less than a year later. doesn't exactly inspire confidence, does it?

didn't they think aerosols weren't a problem back in 1974?

When did Darwin postulate his theory?

 

[H2Andy]

Hence, it is still a theory.

of course it is

and a disprovable theory at that. in fact, it will never be proven. it can only be disproven.

however, it so happens that before a scientific idea gets to be a "theory," lots of things have to happen, and the confidence level must be rather high

do some research one of these days

(how do i say this without making it personal... there's lots you don't seem to know about how things work)

 

[adurso]

Oxnard's findings were based upon bone fragments prior to the discovery of Lucy. There was no "computer analysis", at the time there was no system to run a multivariate analysis, it was run the old fashioned way, any psych undergrad can do this....Oxnard has derived much humor from the "computer analysis" rumor....

 

[H2Andy]

When did Darwin postulate his theory?

ah, my friend, but it has been revised and reworked. some things he stated weren't right, some were not quite right, and some have not exactly matched observable evidence.

but the "idea" as a whole was dead on.

this guy's "idea" as a whole (Lucy is not a pre-human hominid) has pretty much been debunked.

again, you don't seem to understand the difference between a scientific principle and its applications

 

[Bryan]

of course it is

and a disprovable theory at that. in fact, it will never be proven. it can only be disproven.

however, it so happens that before a scientific idea gets to be a "theory," lots of things have to happen, and the confidence level must be rather high

do some research one of these days

I realize that you may not agree with my viewpoint, but do you really think I don't understand what a theory is? Let's not get personal, now.

 

[Soggy]

Other theories are not contested to this degree... however, even aspects of gravity are contested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation#Problems_with_Newton.27s_theory

Hence, it is still a theory.

Newton's equations work on the scales that we live in, but on macro (astronomical) and micro (quantum) level they fail. QED works at the micro level, but not at the observable or astronomical levels. Much work is being done trying to come up with equations that work at all these levels. String theory is one of those.

We don't have all the answers now. So what? We are learning new things every day. Some theories are supported every day, some are disputed. That is how science works.

 

[lamont]

Evolutionary theory has, for over 100 years, fit, to the bill, everything we observe in the animal kingdom today. You seem to misunderstand the concept of "theory" in scientific terms. As long as it is possible for a theory to be proven incorrect, it remains a theory. Gravity is a theory, too, but I doubt you'll find anyone who disputes that if you jump out of an airplane, you'll go splat. Heck, ever heard of the Pythagorean theorem? Are you going to dispute that because it is a "theory"? Good luck finding triangles that violate that "theory."

Triangles in warped space actually violate it -- the angles of a triangle in a gravitational field will not perfectly add up to 180 degrees --- but you need to be talking about some fairly warped space before it can be measured (i'm not certain if we can measure the deviation from 180 degrees for, say, the bending of space at the orbit of mercury or not...)

Anyway, yeah, every few hundred posts we seem to have someone pop up again who has no idea what a scientific theory is or what constitutes truth or fact, and can't tell the difference between believing in Evolution and believing in Santa Claus...

You can never prove any scientific theory correct... All you can do is prove them wrong. The essence of a scientific theory is that it should make testable predictions and that if the prediction is not correct that the the theory is invalidated. You can compile a large list of tests which have succeeded (jump off a building and go splat and everyone that watches you fall adds one more to their list of tests for gravity), but you can never prove it with absolute certainty that something is objectively True in an absolute sense. So far Evolution has not made a prediction which has not been confirmed. If you could extract a prediction from Evolution -- say that based on genetics and the diversity of life on Earth that it must have taken 100 billion years for Evolution to get to this end result -- which was at odds with experiment (in this case that the Earth was 4.5 billion years old and the Universe only 12-18 billion years old), you would falsify Evolution. To date, nobody has been able to falsify Evolution. Good luck.

 

[H2Andy]

I realize that you may not agree with my viewpoint, but do you really think I don't understand what a theory is?

sorry, i don't

you don't seem to understand how science basically works. you seem wholy unaware of what a theory is, how it becomes one, and how it can be disproven.

don't mean to be personal

 

[Soggy]

I realize that you may not agree with my viewpoint, but do you really think I don't understand what a theory is? Let's not get personal, now.

Many people do not understand what a theory is, and some of your arguments have made it seem that way.

 

[lamont]

I realize that you may not agree with my viewpoint, but do you really think I don't understand what a theory is? Let's not get personal, now.

You don't understand what it means for something to be a scientific theory, you've proven that by what you've written. Sorry.