Are successful scientific theories the result of cumulative evidence over many trials and tests, or are they those not yet falsified? By guest columnist Eric Denton
While there is nothing untrue in the article, the fact is that Popper struggled with Darwinian evolution—a theory that he did not doubt but was not testable and for which he coined the term "metaphysical research program" (see Elgin & Sober, "Popper's Shifting Appraisal of Evolutionary Theory" as well as Popper's Darwin Lecture, "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind"). I believe that late in life Popper was coming to terms with apriorism, and I wrote a short article on the compatibility between his and Ludwig von Mises's views of action that came out of Popper's Medawar lecture and his professed acceptance of Mises's "most fundamental theorems" : https://mises.org/mises-wire/mises-and-popper-action
One can hear this ignorance spouted by many college kids today. They are told that 'natural selection' has been disproven. I'm shocked when I hear this as they seem to not understand is that we've merely found additional drivers of evolution such as genetic drift etc. I read Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea long ago and it fundamentally shifted how I understand all this and see the natural world.
The most important observation Dennett made, for me, was the randomness in the 'genetic bush' (it's not a tree). As we look through what we know about it the genetic record, what's clear is that the data can only explained by randomness. There is no signal in the data of any intelligent design. None, and its axiomatic that any design would leave an artifact in the data. In other words, finding randomness leaves no room to claim any kind of design.
Doesn't matter to most people who believe in intelligent design. So I'm getting this from two angles now. A newly confident and aggressive Christian Right (which I'm part of in my own way) asserting debunked nonsense, and dopey, underinformed college student who think 'Darwinism is gross, all that competition, yuck' and find a statement from a book or professor that allows them to preen like this.
I'm nobody, I'm not a scientist, hell I didn't even finish undergrad (college bored me). I read a lot though, and find it sad that most people for whom I attempt to explain the above cannot grasp the implications. Fyi, nothing about 'no design' means there may not have been some divine 'first cause' and I am at once a Catholic who prays and has faith while acknowledging what seems to be 'known' about the world. But it does eliminate God or some other force as 'designing' all life. It's simply not true. Saddest is to see the 'gaps in the fossil record' BS peddled again. Those gaps keep closing more and more each year, yet you don't ever hear that mentioned...
Last. This conversation about the nature of reasoning, evidence and science is crucial, yet so absent from our world. Many people would benefit from understanding Popper, why aren't kids taught this in junior high school instead of Gender Theory? I look at the entire postmodern/crit theory freakshow movement and want to scream, of course 'truth' is contingent. Of course we are biased. But isn't the entire point of 'the Age of Reason' to refine what we know is true? To become 'less wrong' (a great blog I used to enjoy was entitled Less Wrong), this is the purpose of science, and the Modern Age. I think in all of our discussion about method, it's worth noting what the end point is. If we ground ourselves in the belief that their is objective reason, we can bend towards it. But if we do not start by trying to do so, we will end up believing the craziest crap. Look all around you at what our Leftist politics are yielding, can it not be explained by their abandoning science and reason for their postmodern non-truth? It turns out that when you don't believe truth itself exists or is knowable that you'll end up believing anything that is sold to you hard enough. I see the same in many evangelical Christians. I wonder if the two groups realize just how similar they are?
Nice piece. I tell students that it’s theories, all the way down. The image is indeed from Sacrobosco, but it’s copied from Peurbach who first tried to make sense of Ptolemy’s physically impossible cosmology from late in his life.
I like to think of science as "anti-belief". And in that sense we should be cautioned to accept anything on faith, but not just the faith inspired by a formal religion but more subtle faith that comes from "everybody knows that".
Thus any scientist worth the label should question EVERYTHING, at least for themselves to some degree. And to satisfy that doubt, we then have to learn enough about the critical data and reasoning that support one or more current hypotheses or theories.
In that sense Tucker Carlson had some justification in challenging evolution. And the proper rebuttal is not "Well, Darwin and a bunch of smart scientists have proven evolution". Otherwise we risk setting up an alternative belief system. (An aside: that's one problem with teaching college science courses without rigor. IMO teaching physics without calculus is just theology.)
How then to respond? We need to inculcate the acceptance of "I don't know". Because either we have to explain enough to Carlson, and teach him to reason objectively, so he can attain his own confidence in evolutionary theory, or we have to tell him that he does not know enough to achieve the scientific understanding he needs. But until the average person is completely comfortable with "I don't know", they are not going to be happy hearing that.
“I don’t know” I.e., intellectual humility, is critical for learning and advancing the reliability of what we think we know. Science may be authoritative but another danger is when it becomes authoritarian as has happened with the Covid response and some of the climate “crisis”. In science we need to be open, always, to “I don’t know”. And we need to be leery of those who claim, “I do know and the science is settled”.
I must say I worry about the idea that science may never say proof of done but that seems the case., and we are proud of it. Carlson and others of his ill are dangerous and sadly ignorant.Tec
The theory of evolution is a theory based on the Judeo-Christian creation myth. It postulates that all life existing today is descended from ancestors that came into existence a long time ago at a specific point in time. The present-day creation of life, which can be observed going on all around us is denied because it conflicts with the tradional Christian view, which nearly all modern scientists endorse.
Darwinism was never in any real dispute with religionism, as the scientists claim. It was a class struggle, not a theological one. The upper classes found Darwin's ideas conforting because they explained in "scientific" terms why they were at the top; they were better fitted to rule. They used this to justify their continued rule. The working classes did not agree. They refused to accept a theory that permanently relegated them to a subordinate role and insisted they were as fit as their social betters.
Since Darwin was trying to explain the origin of species, their response was, as was justified by the scientific information existing at the time, that nobody yet knows why species are different. In other words, expressed in the normal rethoric of the times, "God made them that way", which was a scientific statement of fact, with the meaning of "We don't know".
The ruling class spun this as a statement of religious faith in the literal truth of the Christian bible myth, and therefore the uneducated masses were still stuck in the dark ages when the bibicalñ myths were taken literally. That was not so. It was only the religion-influenced terminology of the times that cast the scientific lack of information in those words.
While there is nothing untrue in the article, the fact is that Popper struggled with Darwinian evolution—a theory that he did not doubt but was not testable and for which he coined the term "metaphysical research program" (see Elgin & Sober, "Popper's Shifting Appraisal of Evolutionary Theory" as well as Popper's Darwin Lecture, "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind"). I believe that late in life Popper was coming to terms with apriorism, and I wrote a short article on the compatibility between his and Ludwig von Mises's views of action that came out of Popper's Medawar lecture and his professed acceptance of Mises's "most fundamental theorems" : https://mises.org/mises-wire/mises-and-popper-action
One can hear this ignorance spouted by many college kids today. They are told that 'natural selection' has been disproven. I'm shocked when I hear this as they seem to not understand is that we've merely found additional drivers of evolution such as genetic drift etc. I read Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea long ago and it fundamentally shifted how I understand all this and see the natural world.
The most important observation Dennett made, for me, was the randomness in the 'genetic bush' (it's not a tree). As we look through what we know about it the genetic record, what's clear is that the data can only explained by randomness. There is no signal in the data of any intelligent design. None, and its axiomatic that any design would leave an artifact in the data. In other words, finding randomness leaves no room to claim any kind of design.
Doesn't matter to most people who believe in intelligent design. So I'm getting this from two angles now. A newly confident and aggressive Christian Right (which I'm part of in my own way) asserting debunked nonsense, and dopey, underinformed college student who think 'Darwinism is gross, all that competition, yuck' and find a statement from a book or professor that allows them to preen like this.
I'm nobody, I'm not a scientist, hell I didn't even finish undergrad (college bored me). I read a lot though, and find it sad that most people for whom I attempt to explain the above cannot grasp the implications. Fyi, nothing about 'no design' means there may not have been some divine 'first cause' and I am at once a Catholic who prays and has faith while acknowledging what seems to be 'known' about the world. But it does eliminate God or some other force as 'designing' all life. It's simply not true. Saddest is to see the 'gaps in the fossil record' BS peddled again. Those gaps keep closing more and more each year, yet you don't ever hear that mentioned...
Last. This conversation about the nature of reasoning, evidence and science is crucial, yet so absent from our world. Many people would benefit from understanding Popper, why aren't kids taught this in junior high school instead of Gender Theory? I look at the entire postmodern/crit theory freakshow movement and want to scream, of course 'truth' is contingent. Of course we are biased. But isn't the entire point of 'the Age of Reason' to refine what we know is true? To become 'less wrong' (a great blog I used to enjoy was entitled Less Wrong), this is the purpose of science, and the Modern Age. I think in all of our discussion about method, it's worth noting what the end point is. If we ground ourselves in the belief that their is objective reason, we can bend towards it. But if we do not start by trying to do so, we will end up believing the craziest crap. Look all around you at what our Leftist politics are yielding, can it not be explained by their abandoning science and reason for their postmodern non-truth? It turns out that when you don't believe truth itself exists or is knowable that you'll end up believing anything that is sold to you hard enough. I see the same in many evangelical Christians. I wonder if the two groups realize just how similar they are?
Sigh...Happy Sunday.
I enjoyed this article very much. Well done.
Nice piece. I tell students that it’s theories, all the way down. The image is indeed from Sacrobosco, but it’s copied from Peurbach who first tried to make sense of Ptolemy’s physically impossible cosmology from late in his life.
Brilliant. Falsifiability, as opposed to verifiability, is a paradigm-shifting concept. Thank you!
I like to think of science as "anti-belief". And in that sense we should be cautioned to accept anything on faith, but not just the faith inspired by a formal religion but more subtle faith that comes from "everybody knows that".
Thus any scientist worth the label should question EVERYTHING, at least for themselves to some degree. And to satisfy that doubt, we then have to learn enough about the critical data and reasoning that support one or more current hypotheses or theories.
In that sense Tucker Carlson had some justification in challenging evolution. And the proper rebuttal is not "Well, Darwin and a bunch of smart scientists have proven evolution". Otherwise we risk setting up an alternative belief system. (An aside: that's one problem with teaching college science courses without rigor. IMO teaching physics without calculus is just theology.)
How then to respond? We need to inculcate the acceptance of "I don't know". Because either we have to explain enough to Carlson, and teach him to reason objectively, so he can attain his own confidence in evolutionary theory, or we have to tell him that he does not know enough to achieve the scientific understanding he needs. But until the average person is completely comfortable with "I don't know", they are not going to be happy hearing that.
“I don’t know” I.e., intellectual humility, is critical for learning and advancing the reliability of what we think we know. Science may be authoritative but another danger is when it becomes authoritarian as has happened with the Covid response and some of the climate “crisis”. In science we need to be open, always, to “I don’t know”. And we need to be leery of those who claim, “I do know and the science is settled”.
Marvellous reply as usual.
I must say I worry about the idea that science may never say proof of done but that seems the case., and we are proud of it. Carlson and others of his ill are dangerous and sadly ignorant.Tec
Did I miss the part where someone pointed out what “theory” means in science speak? Guess that would’ve been a much shorter post, though.
The theory of evolution is a theory based on the Judeo-Christian creation myth. It postulates that all life existing today is descended from ancestors that came into existence a long time ago at a specific point in time. The present-day creation of life, which can be observed going on all around us is denied because it conflicts with the tradional Christian view, which nearly all modern scientists endorse.
Darwinism was never in any real dispute with religionism, as the scientists claim. It was a class struggle, not a theological one. The upper classes found Darwin's ideas conforting because they explained in "scientific" terms why they were at the top; they were better fitted to rule. They used this to justify their continued rule. The working classes did not agree. They refused to accept a theory that permanently relegated them to a subordinate role and insisted they were as fit as their social betters.
Since Darwin was trying to explain the origin of species, their response was, as was justified by the scientific information existing at the time, that nobody yet knows why species are different. In other words, expressed in the normal rethoric of the times, "God made them that way", which was a scientific statement of fact, with the meaning of "We don't know".
The ruling class spun this as a statement of religious faith in the literal truth of the Christian bible myth, and therefore the uneducated masses were still stuck in the dark ages when the bibicalñ myths were taken literally. That was not so. It was only the religion-influenced terminology of the times that cast the scientific lack of information in those words.
Again, point well taken. But is Denton's PZ Myers-level invective really necessary?