You guys will always clutch the pearls and immediately go for the most ridiculously baseless claims about what I said, lying about that in the process. I've been at opera rehearsals where there were fewer histrionics.
There are many things that biologists can study, make sufficient observations, accurate measurements, legitimate analyses of, but when you can't you can't.
All I pointed out was what Richard Lewontin said in his article, which is blatantly and obviously true about a range of claims made in evolutionary biology, mostly but not exclusively made in order to support the ideology of natural selection, any such claims that it was true of could not legitimately be held to be scientific.
For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.
That was based on a series of inabilities.
- "The multitude of forces operating are individually so weak that no conceivable technique no conceivable technique of observation can measure them.
That means
- 1. they can't be observed and,
- 2. they can't be measured.
I would assert that that would mean any claims about them cannot be tested and cannot be either verified or nullified.
[Update: And if you can't observe them HOW DO YOU KNOW THEY ARE THERE? By this admission, you certainly wouldn't be able to verify even that in many cases if not in every case. ]
The example given by Lewontin focuses on the central claims of Darwinism as it is universally defined, today.
- "There is no possibility of measuring selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak" ,
I would have to have it spelled out for me which genes other than a few that kill the organism or render it sterile he would assert such selective forces can be measured for. I trust Lewontin that there are some other such genes he was thinking of but I'd like to know.
- And, still, Lewontin claims, "yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them" to which I'd say, if you can't observe them and if you can't measure them, how do you know that? Especially considering the next admission.
- "there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were."
That is my point that no matter what you want to assert about organisms that had "traits" that gave them an advantage or caused them to be selected out of the history of their species and whatever species that evolved from them cannot ever be verified because any necessary information that would support whichever claim you made about it "NO MATTER HOW STRONG THOSE FORCES WERE" is unverifiable.
What all Darwinists do and have done from the start is what the old biology books used to mock Lamarck for, making up explanatory stories, in the quintessential example, how giraffes grew long necks to eat leaves out of trees. In my part of the post-WWII generation, we were then, falsely, told that Darwin overturned that by "discovering" natural selection. I didn't learn for decades after that that Darwin, himself, not only fully believed in Lamarckian inheritance, he came up with his own scheme for how it happened and published it. Apparently the ones who created the mythic St. Charles Darwin weren't all that interested in getting their facts straight so much as they were in promoting a phony mascot for the current version of Darwinism.
They all do it whenever they make assertions about organisms which they cannot observe because they are lost in the past, they do it whenever their interpretations of the scant remains as found in fossils are based on insufficient information about numbers and who left more descendants than others of their species to support those claims. I would say they not seldom do so about those they can see in order to squeeze them into adaptationist, Darwinist just-so stories.
I think my post yesterday about the impossibility of determining what, if anything, animal husbandry, on farms, in kennels, what selective breeding of animals and plants in laboratories can tell you about what, if any, relationship that has to what has happened in the wild, again,almost all of which is lost forever in the lost past, is pretty clear.
Tell me how they can know what they're seeing is the same thing as what they claim happened to produce species. I could have pointed out it was one of the early and continuing critiques of Darwin's theory that generations and generations of intensive artificial selection and breeding had yet to produce a new species, apart from a few sterile hybrids. If the Darwinists wanted to claim that but those didn't reproduce their kind so I'd argue they weren't an actual new species that could tell you a thing about the successful species that the theory was alleged to explain. Which, considering all of the above, it doesn't.
That those listed inabilities are, in the extreme, inconvenient to scientists who want to study these enormous and mostly invisible, unmeasurable things doesn't do a thing to remove those problems or reduce their relevance. As I said, when I faced a similar problem in a different field of study, my faculty adviser very rationally and very honestly said, "That's just too bad, it can't be done." Now, aren't you ashamed to have someone in the humanities be more honest about the limits of empirical knowledge than thousands of you guys in science?
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