Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
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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