Bad science?

I think you responded to the wrong guy. I never wrote any of those quotes.

Would it be possible for you to explain to me what any of that has to do with the post to which you were responding?

Ne, the line is clearly demarkated.* puts underpants on head *Dearie me the policeman's lonely, whoops, there go the tall man's trousers, inky-pinky sugar and spice, yeti-yeti-yeti-yeti BOOM.Or maybe I have not gone crazy and the distinction between a theory and a law is exactly what I said it is. Cheers.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Sorry, I'm a newbie round here ... I keep trying to reply to the right person but I'm used to different forum software. Oopsie.

Yes.Let's be precise about this. By "predictive", I don't mean that the theory should tell me what I could see a billion years in the future, 'cos I can't test that. I mean that the theory should have consequences I should be able to test right here, right now.By "power", I do not mean precision. I mean that the theory should divide the possible from the impossible, and the likely from the unlikely.The germ theory of disease is a good example.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

What on earth does this mean?

Nothing at all. I was told that I must go crazy if I tried to distinguish a theory from a law ... I obligingly went crazy.In between distinguishing a theory from a law.Look, I'm English, we have this thing called "humor", only we call it "humour".* bangs head against wall, but very very gently *Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yeah, I know.I do too.

With apologies to Rex Harrison: --PercyEdited by Percy, : Minor tweak.Edited by Percy, : Tweak end of last verse.Edited by Percy, : Another tweak.

I didn't know that there was such a requirement for immediacy. One good example is that the Theory of Evolution predicts that there was some land dwelling critter that was the ancestor of the Manatee but it was over 150 years before such a critter was found.So while a theory must be predictive, is it not that case that often the tests cannot be carried out for long periods of time, either because (as in physics) often we do not have the technology to do the test or as in biology, the predicted critter just ain't been found yet?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

No, no, you misunderstand me. I do not maintain that a theory must only have immediately testable consequences --- I mean that only these predictions allow us to evaluate the theory. 150 years ago the ancestor of the manatee was not evidence for evolution, 'cos no-one had seen it. The evidence (when Darwin wrote) lay in morphology and biogeography.My point was, it is no good someone boasting about the immense predictive power of their theory if it only refers to things which can't be immediately tested ... say, a theory which predicts with great precision what will happen in a billion years' time, but with no consequences in the present. This would not be impressive.

Sure as heck would be if in a billion years time it comes true.

quote:

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There seems to be hundreds of definitions of science. Is seems to me that evolutionists think that fossils talk a very long time to form.(millions of years perhaps)

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If part of science is observation and we observe in Japan and following the Mount St. Helens eruption the formation of fossils in a short period of time.

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The "pre-concieved" notion here seemed to me to have been "dynamics." I do not think there is any question that Agassiz used BOTH sides of Kant's "on the other hand" (in the "Critique of Judgment") reference to Lineaus when moving from a consideration of Glacial motions to fossil fish formations.Yes, I think it is a "bad habit" if taxonomists must not be considered good "scientists" if they have not mastered the triple integral solute of Newton. Gould however created his name for evolutionary theory without a need to expand the flexible wrist of taxonomy using the standard scientific elements of dynamics.Fossilzation does not seem to me just an example here. The author asks if scientists should not consider the difference between their prejudice for long times vs the observation of short ones (as ICR did much on for the current generation). As far as I can see no retraction is necessary except that taxonomists SHOULD be better trained in mathematics so that convolutionary system that Gould created is not continued in the history of biology without using some more stringent logical and mathematical processing of the same data. Unfortuantely molecular biology where this move has occurred in science tends to make up more words rather than trying to reduce some of the taxanomic redundancies as occurrs regularly in straight forward "stamp" collecting lineage taxonmy itself.If better mathematics and physics were dynamically involved then "time" would not be open to any philosophical consideration as it currently retains but instead specific models of it would be used in coverstation (compare :Bohm hidden variables vs older Quantum mechanics, for instance ).Before one simulates dyanmically it is important to have some notion of the kinematics. It would be very interesting if the kinematics of different geological horizons constrained the dynamics across the horizon. In this case Gould simple expendient of physical analogy between terminal strata justapositions and acceleration vs retardation of evolutionary rates when "scaled" into geological time would not simply be a wash in the very valley that was likely misrecognized as not glacial when it was.I hope that my first post in this thread came across as what Kant called praeter propter in his "Introduction to Logic" page 45 below: Edited by Brad McFall, : clarification of first post contributed in this thread.