Foundations of ID

As has been pointed out, science predates the philosophies of Popper; moreover, that philosophy, and the philosophy of science in general, has never been the foundation of science. The foundation of science is scientists making observations and developing theory. The philosophy of science you refer to is simply a means to describe, not perscribe, that process.

Doesn't the fact that we can set up quantum experiments that only produce a certain outcome when unobserved, and then get those outcomes, lead to the inescapable conclusion that there's no other observer besides us?If there's an observer god watching everything all the time, how is it that we can successfully perform quantum experiments that only work when unobserved?

So, God can opt not to observe, and chooses not to when that observation might substantiate his existence?He's kinda like a cockroach that way. Turn on the lights and he's off to the nearest corner of insubstantiability.

This is nonsense. Variation between taxa? Organisms can no more vary between taxa than you can change who your biological parents are.Evolution predicts that the number of species within a given taxa will expand over time; there's no way an organism can leave a taxa. The arrangement is hierarchial; all organisms share at least one taxa, more closely related organisms share more taxa.If you define "macroevolution" as something that can't possibly ever occur, then no shit, you're never going to find evidence for it. How much complexity now exists? How much can we get per year? Why the assumption that the universe doesn't start out with any? Sounds like you're making a lot of stuff up, to me.

I show you my photo album, taken with my digital camera. What's great about your average digital camera is that it timestamps the image files. The images are all of me, standing by my car in front of the USA's great national monuments.What's really funny is that, if you put the pictures in order by timestamp, and then map out the locations of the monuments in the picture, you find that there's a convergence of first-to-last and east-to-west. In other words the first picture in the time series is also the eastmost in the map series, and that pattern continues all the way to the last, westmost picture.Now, even though a picture is a static image and not a moving picture, and indeed, even though I'm never seen actually driving in my car, a reasonable person would conclude that this is a record of a roadtrip to see the sights, starting in the east and going west.But creationists and ID'ists, since they don't see any movement when they look at the static record, would have us believe that this is no record at all - simply a series of unconnected photographs that have nothing to do with each other, and that intelligent aliens or a supernatural power actually teleported myself and my car, as we stood motionless, from monument to monument to monument.C'mon, guys. Species appearing suddenly? A record of stasis? Of course that's what the fossil record looks like. The fossils are dead; they don't change. Species appearing suddenly is exactly what you would expect from a static, sampled record of change. How dumb do you think we are?

You mean, wouldn't it be great if we could determine an upper and lower age for the fossils we find based on the geologic matrix in which we find them?Good thing we can do exactly that. Naturally, we can't perform breeding experiments on organisms that are not alive. So we have to infer species from taxonomy, which is generally more accurate than not. Not perfect, of course.But if the argument you're making is that we don't know everything, therefore we know nothing, well, you're going to find that's not a position that people are going to find compelling. I certainly don't. Oh, shit! This stuff might actually be hard! Hell, we'd better just give up now and go to church. That's a whole lot easier, now isn't it? Why would I think that? Neither Gould nor Eldridge denied that the fossil record was a record of evolution. You, apparently, do. Hey, look. We can show you the dots. If you don't want to connect them, because doing so would conflict with your faith, how is any of that my problem? If you're determined to remain ignorant there's really little I can do to stop you. Abominable. I'm neither a student now, nor am I particularly young, nor have I ever attended MU. I have no training in the sciences beyond what I've absorbed on my own initiative. The only "propaganda" I was ever exposed to was creationist propaganda, when I was a creationist for some time. In between that period and now I was briefly a proponent of ID until I realized how it lacked any scientific foundation to stand on. Why would we see that?

Well, cladistically, they never would. But what would happen is that all these different separated populations would give rise to a number of seperate subspecies of sheep, and then over more time and more separations those subspecies would beging to breed true only with their peers and become species in their own right, and at that time "sheep" would cease to be a species and become something like a genus, and as the number of different species decended from sheep populations increased and increased, "sheep" as a category would expand until it was something like "ruminate" or "mammal" in scope.That's what evolution predicts. Not that species will jump around from taxa to taxa, but that each clade expands in regards to the number of species that it encapsulates. This is often hard for the layperson to understand so it's no surprise to see you have trouble with it.