I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
You are too kind to ID.
ReplyDeleteYou are right that the proposition "X could not have evolved" is falsifiable. But the refutation of that proposition would not falsify ID, since the falsity of the proposition "X could not have evolved" does not mean ID is false.
To put it another way, it is not a necessary part of ID, that evolution is incapable of producing what we see. Rather, the proposition is that it did not in fact do so.
That's not how I understand, for instance, Behe. As I read him, he's saying that the evidence for ID is that the eye, for example, could not have evolved because a non-functional proto-eye would be useless. (I think he actually focuses more on cases in molecular biology, his own field.)
ReplyDeleteBehe does not deny evolution occurs and explains some features of organisms well. Therefore, if you showed that every instance he proposes of something too complex to have evolved really could have done so, if honest, he'd have to admit defeat.
Surely all that Behe is seeking to do - like a good critical rationalist (!!) - is to falsify evolution by showing a case in which it could not work.
ReplyDeleteBut the failure of a particular attempt to falsify conjecture A (evolution), does not of course entail that competing conjecture B (ID) is false. Hence the fact that it is possible in principle to test the conjecture that eyes could not have evolved, does not render ID falsifiable in principle.
No, I don't think this analysis is right. Behe is saying features x, y, and z are not susceptible to Darwinian explanations, so there must be ID. If it turns out x, y, and z are susceptible to such explanations, his theory is falsified.
ReplyDeleteI side with Gene on this one. Behe (in a published interview--See The Case for a Creator) says that his claims are falsifiable. In particular, if a biologist could show that a cell could have plausibly arisen step-by-step from inorganic compounds, then Behe would concede defeat. (Of course, you can say that Behe would never admit the explanation was a good one.)
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