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One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

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Re: One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

#51

Post by jfengel »

msla wrote: post #39
jfengel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feyerabend isn't so much a "better approach" as a lack of an approach. He does a good job trying to get past the numerous problems of Popper's work, but in doing so largely just reverses it without adding anything useful. The way I read it, it really dates back to Hume and the problem of induction. Until we have a Final Theory to hand, we never really know anything. That is a statement of epistemology. But science ca…

> Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way. It isn't helpful for anyone and we have very concrete examples of that to hand: Anti-vaxxers love to point out stuff like Vioxx, but never say a damn thing about al…

It's generally harmless for philosophers to believe stuff, since they don't drive buses, and they generally get their vaccinations regardless of the epistemological status of their effectiveness. For that matter, they continue to eat food, despite the uncertainty whether they're really holding a peanut butter sandwich and not, say, the average temperature of the asteroid Ceres.

They get to be anarchic, as long as you can't prove otherwise -- and "prove" in the mathematical sense, not the scientific one. All it costs you is paper, pencils, and the price of a trash can. (Which they never use.) If you shut down the line of reasoning just because other people are incredibly, dangerously stupid, you're going to have to shut down pretty much everything.

Re: One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

#52

Post by jovial_cavalier »

Shut up. This is on the intellectual level of a middle schooler. This is not an interesting conversation. You are only hurting your own side. Shut up.

If I were Laura Van Holstein, I would be embarrassed of this article, especially with that headline.

Anyone who claims to have "proven" something of this nature, or to have "settled" the discussion, needs to not be taken seriously.

Re: One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

#53

Post by baddox »

BaronSamedi wrote: post #14
normalnorm wrote: post #5

Scientific theories are not "proven", that is not how science works. All theories are always and forever open to falsification. The scientific attitude is one of eternal doubt. "Proof" is something that only exists in the realm of pure math.

I think the reality is more subtle than this. Is, for example, the discovery of DNA going to be falsified? I don't think so. Is the notion that living organisms evolve going to be falsified? Again, I doubt it. The case of Newton and Einstein is relevant here. Einstein didn't "falsify" Newton but rather enriched our understanding of physics. A better model seems to be that scientific theories fit into a spectrum of ce…

But you’re using precisely the mindset that you should be using. You doubt that DNA or evolution will be falsified.

And, of course, Einstein’s theory absolutely did falsify Newton’s. I’m not aware of any epistemology or terminology within which you can claim that he didn’t.

Re: One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

#54

Post by vikramkr »

msla wrote: post #42
vikramkr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dna could be falsified. It's incredibly low chance but it could. Just like the discovery of the bacteria that causes influenza was falsified once it became clear it's a virus. Just like the so called central dogma of DNA->RNA->protein turned out to be not so central or not so dogmatic. And Einstein definitely falsified Newton with the famous experiment with the eclipse and with more correctly showing Mercury's orbit,…

The existence of DNA will never be falsified. The experiments which discovered DNA happened. New experiments don't make old experiments un-happen. Similarly, the fact DNA->RNA->protein is how it works at least some of the time isn't going to become false.

Those experiments could be wrong. They likely aren't and are like however many sigma accurate to the point that for all intents and purposes it's guaranteed to exist, but there's a reason that physisicts waited for 5 sigmabaccuracy before announcing the higgs for example. Other things people were really confident about existing because they thought they saw it, like a bacteria that causes influenza, with their own eyes, turned out to be false. you intellectually honest thing to say is that yes it is incredibly incredibly incredibly likely that DNA will not be falsified. But you can't say that with absolute certainty. it's not like in mathematics where you create the rules of the game and then can prove that within those rules you can accomplish XYZ which is a proof. We didn't write the rules of the universe.

Re: One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

#55

Post by boomboomsubban »

piokoch wrote: post #50
BaronSamedi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reality is more subtle than this. Is, for example, the discovery of DNA going to be falsified? I don't think so. Is the notion that living organisms evolve going to be falsified? Again, I doubt it. The case of Newton and Einstein is relevant here. Einstein didn't "falsify" Newton but rather enriched our understanding of physics. A better model seems to be that scientific theories fit into a spectrum of ce…

There is a difference between discovery and theory. Discovery of Americas or Mars cannot be "falsified", they are scientific, objective, observable facts. Theory makes always some assumptions that can be invalid under some conditions - for instance Newtonian mechanics is not valid on quantum size scale or in case of huge masses or near speed of light velocities.

The difference is that a "discovery" is the result of an experiment used to support a theory. The results of an experiment can't be falsified, just more experiments can provide better data.

Re: One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

#57

Post by vikramkr »

raverbashing wrote: post #48
tossAsimov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's trying to make a point similar to the one made by Asimov: https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...

Completely agree. I think people are too hung up on the "falsifiability" term and don't look at the bigger picture As your link puts nicely: "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put tog…

We're not saying they're equally falsifiable though. We have p values and sigmas and statistics to deal with different levels of wrongness and likeliness of being wrong. Nobody's saying that DNA and a bacteria causing influenza are equally likely to be wrong or equally wrong or something. The problem is saying that dna's existence is not falsifiable. That is an incorrect statement. That's all that's being pointed out.

Re: One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

#58

Post by HelloNurse »

phkahler wrote: post #43
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no clear-cut definition between species It's not clear-cut in all cases. But it's clear cut bilaterally. Two organisms are in the same species if they can successfully reproduce, i.e. produce an offspring that can itself produce offspring. If they can't, they're in different species. (Multilateral fuzziness arises if A can reproduce with B, and B with C, but A not with C.)

So why are different ethnicities of humans not considered sub-species? They developed in different geographic regions with barriers, the can interbreed successfully, and they have different appearances, not just in skin color, but in things like facial features. And yet the article specifically states that humans don't have subspecies.

Because subspecies are a particularly arbitrary taxonomical division. Some of the pragmatic reasons are that human "ethnicities" are very fuzzy because people travel around, that they are only an average of arbitrary large groups of related people, and that people tend to look meaningfully similar only to their closest relatives, and only partially.

Re: One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

#59

Post by mplanchard »

ggggtez wrote: post #56

It seems like everyone commenting on this article lost their gosh-darn minds. Can I helpfully remind folks to try to have productive discussions instead of quibbling about the definition of "proven", and outright vitriol?

Vitriol is never justifiable for this sort of thing, I agree. I do think calling out the unscientific use of the word “proven” or “proved” is reasonable on a forum where so many people have at least some scientific training.

I studied and taught biology and chemistry in grad school in the south. Lots of people don’t “believe” in evolution and will base some of that on the fact that the theory isn’t “proven”, without understanding the rigor that proof implies in a scientific context.

Usage like we see in the article is problematic. What if this finding were disproven later? What does that teach people who don’t know any better about the nature of proof?

Re: One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Cambridge researcher

#60

Post by dlivingston »

baddox wrote: post #53
BaronSamedi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reality is more subtle than this. Is, for example, the discovery of DNA going to be falsified? I don't think so. Is the notion that living organisms evolve going to be falsified? Again, I doubt it. The case of Newton and Einstein is relevant here. Einstein didn't "falsify" Newton but rather enriched our understanding of physics. A better model seems to be that scientific theories fit into a spectrum of ce…

But you’re using precisely the mindset that you should be using. You doubt that DNA or evolution will be falsified. And, of course, Einstein’s theory absolutely did falsify Newton’s. I’m not aware of any epistemology or terminology within which you can claim that he didn’t.

I like to think of scientific theories as having a certain "resolution", à la photos. Over time, our collective resolution over some domain increases.

For example, Newton's Principia isn't wrong. Newton's gravity is just a lower-resolution photo than Einstein's; a first-order approximation to Einstein's second-order.

And the day will come (or so Brian Greene et al. hope) when Einstein's general theory of relativity will be "falsified", and so on, because any human interpretation of reality is necessarily that: an interpretation.

Theories just get more "granular" in the depth of their answers.

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