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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SilentZ who wrote (408320)	8/20/2008 1:22:28 AM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1573823

Ten is a techie, but he's no "science head" either..

To: SilentZ who wrote (408320)	8/20/2008 2:13:13 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1573823

"Ummm, I'm no science head like y'all, but isn't it sort of the whole basis of the scientific method?" Not the basis, that is repeatability, but certainly the goal. Theories with no predictive value are considered to be very weak. Now, the usual reason for that is they are too overly broad. One of the reasons why Darwin came up with evolution was because he was seeing that, in isolated populations, familiar creatures were filling different niches. The best example are the finches. Instead of just being seed eaters, which they usually are, there were versions that ate insects and other things. So, what is the predictive value of classical Darwinism? Well, you can readily predict that all ecological niches are likely to be filled. Sometimes they aren't and that is usually when the organisms which filled them has gone extinct for whatever reason. In addition, the more isolated the area is, the more likely that organisms who can travel far will fill those niches. Take New Zealand for example. Almost no native mammals, two species of ground dwelling bats and that is it, but a huge variety of birds in many of the ecological niches.