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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tunica Albuginea who wrote (590)	9/16/1999 1:12:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

>BUT, b u t, Lather.Rinse.Repeat....of course evolution has been extended back by the scientific method of trying to reconstruct a past event. ( same type of logic used in reconstructing the Theory of Evolution )!!!!! The Theory clearly implies no Guiding Hand . Well then obviously it is logical, reasonable, human? to assume, that there was No Guiding Hand also in the pre-biotic era, , correct?< Here's the thing to remember. The key to the scientific method is "start simple and add complexity only when it cannot be avoided". Adding a Guiding Hand to the mix is an added complexity ... there would need to be Good Evidence of a guiding hand (and not b.s. emotional arguments like "look at a living cell and tell me that came from mud"). Currently - there is no halfway-reliable evidence of a Guiding Hand - no key observation or measurable quantity that shows that Something Extramundane is going on. The Guiding Hand theorists are necessarily oblique - they start with the postulate of a Guiding Hand and then use sleight-of-idea to try to prove its involvement. But there is nothing a straight scientist can sink his teeth into ... no equivalent of a Rosetta Stone or an Archaeopteryx or a Cepheid light curve. So to put together a speculative theory concerning the Black Box ... the basic rule is Keep it Simple. Start with the idea that what you see is what you get. We're pretty sure that four billion years ago we had ... salty water, methane, some ammonia, carbon dioxide, a dazzling array of igneous and sedimentary silicate minerals ... and atmospheric plasma chemistry. The Miller-Urey experiment showed that this was enough to generate many of the basic molecules used to construct modern life. But going from the bricks to a fully-functioning train station requires other stuff we flat don't know. This is imo one of the more obvious Frontiers of Science, and it is not served by dogmatists from either direction. The bottom line is We Don't Know how the connection was made from prebios to full-bore unicell. There are no fossils, either morphological or chemical, to fill in the big gaps. <this next is important> But to postulate a Guiding Hand at this stage without material evidence thereof is cheating, sorta like the throwaway plot of the third Star Wars movie. Current theories assume no Guiding Hand, but it is not a dogmatic requirement. it is not a religion. Give us something measurable, units, dimensions ... that shows the trace of a Guiding Hand and any honest scientist will use it. Once the unicell is in place - however it got there, ordinary mechanistic evolution theory is so far doing a good job of describing the last coupla billion years. We have some holes to fill, like the speciation question, but until answers are found either way on that question presupposing a Guiding Hand (or arguing positivelly that there was none) are both cheating. The plan, the hope, is that the two black boxes here (origin and speciation) can be modeled or recreated using the growing toolset of facts and relationships that we learned from mundane, material biochemistry, geology, whatnot. Our insight into how the DNA is written, read and edited is truly embryonic. If we crack that, we can load the algorithms into a computer (or a billion computers) and see if Just Chance will build what we seek. If so ... there is that much less need to invoke a Guiding Hand. If not ... we can "perturb" the model until it lines up with what we know of Earth's history. In that case we would get a chance to trace a shadowy outline of the Guiding Hand. It is an article of faith with me that learning is a cardinal virtue. We're here to learn EVERYTHING we can. And imo presupposing the nature of a Guiding Hand without good, testable evidence thereof is a sin against the Imperative to Learn. I am confident that if there is indeed a Guiding hand, pure science will show that.