Bishop Hill writes:
Fred Pearce is on the receiving end of the full fury of the warmosphere for his article about the Lisbon conference in New Scientist. Pearce, discussing who had agreed to turn up, said this:
But the leaders of mainstream climate science turned down the gig, including NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, who said the science was settled so there was nothing to discuss.
Now Josh’s take:
ivaz says:
“In any field there will be some aspects of knowledge that are beyond reasonable doubt. Heliocentric solar system, evolution by natural selection, HIV resulting from a virus infection, the ozone whole (sic) resulting from CFC’s….”
Just a minute! You slipped that one about CFCs and ozone into an otherwise reasonable argument. I, and I suspect that many other WUWT readers, have serious doubts about CFCs causing the ozone hole!
Jeff says:
I found this sentence to be a refreshing admission:
“The fundamental conflict is of what (if anything) we should do about greenhouse gas emissions (and other assorted pollutants), not what the weather was like 1000 years ago.”
I think it also reveals that for these guys, anthropogenic climate gases are simply assumed a priori to cause dangerous climate change, while periods of larger climate fluctuations than we’ve seen in the last 100 years are just downplayed as “weather”. It’s so strongly rooted in an ideological/religious belief system that even a sudden onset of a global glaciation wouldn’t make them change their minds.
Vuk
I enjoy your participation and only wish I found your material easier to understand, not least because I suspect there is traction there. The Punch and Judy show here between you-know-whom I find by turns funny, sad, provoking in a good way, and boring – and I expect most here experience much the same. I’ve now studied EU, motivated by both sides. Recently I’ve been pushing Steve Mosher’s position re the iniquitous paragraph in AR4 that allows mainstreamers to continue using the iniquitous Jones & Wang on UHI, and ignore McKitrick & Michaels and all our stuff. But I disagree with him quite strongly in some other issues.
Thank God for WUWT debate.
Espen says:
February 6, 2011 at 3:20 am
“I think it also reveals that for these guys, anthropogenic climate gases are simply assumed a priori to cause dangerous climate change, while periods of larger climate fluctuations than we’ve seen in the last 100 years are just downplayed as “weather”. ”
‘These guys’ do not assume as an a prior that GHGs cause climate change, (the ‘dangerous’ part is the political spin) It is a rational conclusion from the known physics of energy absorption by anthropogenic gases and the laws of thermodynamics.
Periods of past climate fluctuation are NOT dismissed as weather, the appropriate explanation is sought. So the glacial cycles of the last ~2 million years are explained by the orbital variations and the closing of the Panama ithmus and the LIA by increased volcanism and decreased solar activity.
Roger Longstaff says:
February 6, 2011 at 3:07 am
“Just a minute! You slipped that one about CFCs and ozone into an otherwise reasonable argument. I, and I suspect that many other WUWT readers, have serious doubts about CFCs causing the ozone hole! ”
Others may have doubts about evolution by natural selection, but the fact that some here have serious doubts about other aspects of established science does not improve the credibility of the position of those that express doubt over AGW.
izen says:
‘These guys’ do not assume as an a prior that GHGs cause climate change, (the ‘dangerous’ part is the political spin) It is a rational conclusion from the known physics of energy absorption by anthropogenic gases and the laws of thermodynamics.
Since we have no firm knowledge of which way the feedbacks work, the known physics of CO2 energy absorption only allows for a rational conclusion about entirely benign global warming.
Periods of past climate fluctuation are NOT dismissed as weather,
Yes they are. Please read the Gavin quote again.
Lucy Skywalker says: February 6, 2011 at 4:18 am
……….
No.1 – WUWT is great ( Anthony is kind of a modern age Gutenberg).
No.2 – to paraphrase Mark Twain ‘the more I think about it, the more I don’t understand it’.
izen says:
February 6, 2011 at 4:35 am:
“Others may have doubts about evolution by natural selection, but the fact that some here have serious doubts about other aspects of established science does not improve the credibility of the position of those that express doubt over AGW.”
Izen, I believe that the case in point is “settled science”. I often challenge CAGW proponents thus “There is no evidence at all to support the hypothesis that anthropogenic carbon dioxide will cause any harmful global warming”. I now challenge you to refute:
There is no evidence at all that CFCs have any effect on what has been described as “the ozone hole”.
This is what first alerted me to eco-warriors. As always – follow the money! I would be interested to find out what other WUWT readers think.
vukcevic says:
February 6, 2011 at 5:06 am
“Lucy Skywalker says: February 6, 2011 at 4:18 am
……….
No.1 – WUWT is great ( Anthony is kind of a modern age Gutenberg).”
Personally I tend to see Anthony more like Wycliff, translating the incomprehensible into the vernacular and challenging the orthodoxy – and being seen as just as much a heretic by the Magisterium (which the Pope Mann and his followers resemble extremely) and its secular self-interested supporters.
@Izen-
Perhaps there are cases where “settled” science has been proven wrong that you could share with us.
“Never argue with an idiot. They’ll drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.”
There’s a corollary probably older and from which the above was derived. It might be more apt in this case because climate boffins are not idiots they’re ideologists. The old saying is:
Never wrestle with a pig. You’ll both get covered with filth but the pig will enjoy it.
Aynsley Kellow’s post reminded me of this quote from David L Goodstein:
‘Fenman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.”‘
Terrific point! I’m printing it out and sending around.
Makes me understand better why I instinctively want to move to Hawaii, or the Caribbean—especially as I look out on our mountains of snow here in Massachusetts. . .
/Mr Lynn
sleeper says: February 6, 2011 at 5:55 am
“Perhaps there are cases where “settled” science has been proven wrong that you could share with us.”
Phlogiston, ether, Piltdown man, Larmarkian evolution, non-relativistic space, light being something that comes from the eye, the non-existance of bacteria.
ivaz says:
“In any field there will be some aspects of knowledge that are beyond reasonable doubt. Heliocentric solar system, evolution by natural selection, HIV resulting from a virus infection, the ozone whole (sic) resulting from CFC’s….”
You are not covering the entire story. There was a time when Newton’s accounts of gravity and cosmology were beyond serious doubt. Newton’s accounts are extremely useful even today. Newton’s equations are used for calculating probe launches within our solar system. Newton’s equations can be deduced as a special case from Einstein’s equations by limiting the speeds and masses considered. Yet Newton’s “vision” of the universe has been replaced by Einstein’s “vision.” In addition, geometry has changed fundamentally since Newton’s time. In cosmology, geometry has been replaced by topology, which in simple terms is geometry done on the surface of a ball. So, when people criticize a science or parts of a science, they do not necessarily mean that the science is false in all contexts and no longer useful at all. They might mean simply that reformulating the science to take advantage of a new system of mathematics is too difficult to be worth the trouble.
Consider Darwin’s science. If that were all we knew of evolution then the study of evolution would be the province of archaeologists employed by museums. For all Darwin’s talk about natural selection, he never provided horse breeders with something they did not know and horse breeders have not created a new species through natural selection. Darwin knew that there must be a mechanism of heredity but he had not a clue what it was. Mendel discovered that the effects of heredity could be studied statistically and gave birth to population genetics. But Mendel, too, had not a clue about the mechanism of heredity. The science of genetics was created by chemists who pushed a highly labor intensive task for decades before Crick and Watson took the glory with the Double Helix. Now we have genetic engineering. Can all this work be tied together? The answer is no. It is not possible to take the information provided by genetic studies and use it to retrodict the evolution of species through natural selection. In principle it is possible, so Darwinian evolution is sound on methodological grounds. But in fact it is not possible to discover the specific history of a species’ traits and those traits’ selection by the environment, except for something like drosophila whose environment can be manufactured.
The moral of the story is that science is never settled, never complete, and never fully satisfactory. There are “some aspects of knowledge that are beyond reasonable doubt” regarding direct falsification from predictions, but none that are beyond doubt from improvements in fundamental principles or in mathematical systems.
Izen,
“A few centuries ago the science was settled for the Heliocentric solar system. No further evidence is going to refute that settled science. That did not mean that the mechanism that explains the settled science of the Sun at the center was certain, the full explanation of all the observed aspects of the Heliocentric system like the precession of the perihelion of Mercury only got explained in the last century.”
What you say is true, but irrelevant. All you have done is cherry picked a few examples for your ‘settled science’ against which only a few refinements were later made. Conclusion: AGW is settled science so it must be as reliable as the heliocentric model of the universe. Well, leaving aside the fact that it is only one side of the debate that is actually claiming the science is settled, I would like to take you on a brief history of the science of cosmology, since you were the one who raised it.
Before Hubble in 1926 it was settled science that the universe was only the size of the galaxy and was static. Since hubble it was settled science that the universe was expanding at a decreasing rate, because gravity must slow down the rate of expansion. We now know differently.
How settled is settled science?
I should have added a very important practical point. Our most fundamental science is physics. Yet physicists are keenly aware that their science is not settled and not satisfying. In fact, they have suffered from a huge itch and they created the CERN project to scratch that itch. The CERN project could very well deliver some falsifications of some theoretical statements in physical theory. Given that our most fundamental and most high level science is unsettled and unsatisfying to the tune of megabillions for the CERN project, how could anyone claim that a less fundamental science is settled, except for a trivial claim such as “The science of citrus fruit in south Florida is settled.” /not sarc
As a mildly humorous aside, if Schmidt worked for CERN he would insist that Earth marks the site where the newest black hole will appear and that Congress must pony up mega-gazillions to study how to fill it. Talk about Dr. Evil! /sarc off
Because of my interest in Fred Pearce, who is a fine professional journalist, I read some comments on the Pearce-Schmidt dustup at New Scientist. I have some advice for some of the commenters. They remind me of a group of harmless academics who are discussing a “trick” that one of them learned. This trick enables him to save money on taxes, insurance, whatever, but the trick involves a “minor” deception. It never occurs to them that what they are doing is conspiring to defraud the government, an insurance company, or whomever. It never occurs to them that what they are doing makes them subject to major penalties including years in prison. I do not mean that they are actually committing such fraud. I mean that their conversation is clearly in a bubble that is designed to protect them from the real world, the world that they view as a place of lesser intelligence and lesser morality. I call it the John Kerry syndrome. You have to remember his yacht.
@-Roger Longstaff says:
February 6, 2011 at 5:39 am
“ I now challenge you to refute:
There is no evidence at all that CFCs have any effect on what has been described as “the ozone hole”.”
Okay, tho it is perhaps of more relevance in the Antarctic warming thread where it is an important component in the SAM intensification.
The chemical reactions that occur between haloalkanes and ozone driven by UV are confirmed by direct observational evidence both in controlled experiments under various conditions (including simulations of the stratosphere) and in-situ measurement in stratosphere using balloons. NASA went one better and adapted a redundent U2 spy plane to take measurements.
But I find the best evidence for the robust finding that CFCs destroy ozone is in the historical development of the theory from speculation through hypothesis to well established theory.
It starts with Dobson developing a spectrophotometer in the mid 40s to measure the amount of ozone above the sensor. It was known from balloon measurement that most of this ozone was in the stratosphere and is formed by the action of UV from sunlight on the O2. One of the motivations for the development of the Dobson sensor was to test the theory that slow equatorial to polar air currents in the upper atmosphere moved ozone from the tropics, where most is produced, to the poles.
The Brewer-Dobson hypothesis was that this horizontal movement would maintain ozone levels during the polar winter despite the absence of sunlight.
This was confirmed by the measurement of ozone levels at the pole which were observed to decrease, but not fall to zero, during the winter before increasing when sunlight returned. This established the existence of this horizontal current that was given the name Brewer-Dobson circulation. No ozone hole in the polar spring was observed at that time.
In the 60s-70s there are concerns that chemicals introduced into the stratosphere by human activity might increase the breakdown of ozone. The main culprits were thought to be water vapor and NOx from space launches and high altitude aircraft. Further work on the amount and reactivity of these compounds indicated that they did not pose a significant problem. In 74 Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina put forward the hypothesis that CFCs could also catalyze the destruction of ozone and estimated that if production increased it could result in a reduction of 5-7%.
There were several objections to this hypothesis. It was doubted that CFCs would migrate to the stratosphere in significant amounts. It was uncertain whether they would be a significant source of Chlorine compared to possible natural sources and the rate of reaction seemed to limit the possible impact.
Lovelock developed a sensor for CFCs that soon showed that CFCs were well mixed globally and certainly did reach the stratosphere, including at the pole.
Measurements of haloalkanes in the stratosphere showed that insignificant amounts of natural compounds reached that level. Like water vapor they were ‘rained out ‘ before that altitude.
Then in 85 the direct measure of ozone over the S pole revealed a ~50% decrease in ozone in the spring when previously ozone would increase. The correlation of this new behavior with the increase in CFCs inevitably raised the possible role of CFCs in this much larger decrease in ozone than had been predicted from the basic chemistry already known.
Further research by ballons and that US spy plane revealed that the destructive potential of CFCs on ozone was enhanced by ice crystals formed in the very cold conditions of the polar cold season. With the return of sunlight this ice crystal matrix vastly increased the rate at which the photochemsitry acted with CFCs to destroy ozone.
That history of the development of the idea, the predictions from it, the sceptical response refuted by direct measurement and the eventual discovery of the enhanced effect because of the special conditions at the S pole is evidence I find impossible to regard as anything but extremely robust.
However if you prefer the actual scientific papers that established all this chemistry this would seem to be a good link references as it does many of the key papers. –
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v347/n6291/abs/347347a0.html
“The possibility that the stratospheric ozone layer could be depleted by half at certain latitudes and seasons would have been deemed a preposterous and alarmist suggestion in the early 1980s. A decade later, the statement is acknowledged as proved beyond reasonable scientific doubt. Observations of the composition of the Antarctic stratosphere have established that the chemistry of this region is highly unusual because of its extreme cold temperatures, leading to a greatly enhanced susceptibility to chlorine-catalysed ozone depletion.”
If you want a simpler description with pretty graphics of the chemical rprocesses try; –
http://www.theozonehole.com/ozonedestruction.htm
@-sleeper says:
February 6, 2011 at 5:55 am
“@Izen-
Perhaps there are cases where “settled” science has been proven wrong that you could share with us.”
Mike Haseler has mentioned some options, although the piltdown man was not regarded as ‘settled’ science by any but English paleontologists with a bias towards a National fossil of importance. It was largely ignored as spurious and doubtful by the rest of paleontology and was correctly indentified as an amalgam of human skull with an ape jaw by dental experts with a couple of years of its ‘discovery’.
Species invarience and Lamarkism had less to do with settled science than trying to construct a biological theory that did not contradict biblical scripture.
The best one would be the aether. The assumption that anything with a wave property would require a medium for its propogation. This carried the inevitable corrollary that velocities would be additive.
The Maxwell equations overturned this settled science by providing an accurate description of electromagnetic phenomina that required an invarient speed of propogation contradicting the ‘settled science’ of a universal frame of reference in a aether.
Theo Goodwin says:
February 6, 2011 at 7:29 am
“You are not covering the entire story…
It is not possible to take the information provided by genetic studies and use it to retrodict the evolution of species through natural selection.”
I would dispute this claim. It may not always be possible, but the work for instance on the genetics of the loss of eyes in fish that become cave-dwellers does show that genetics can be used to retrodict the evolution of such species.
@-
Vince Causey says:
February 6, 2011 at 8:25 am
“What you say is true, but irrelevant. All you have done is cherry picked a few examples for your ‘settled science’ against which only a few refinements were later made.”
Theo Goodwin says:
February 6, 2011 at 9:04 am
I should have added a very important practical point. Our most fundamental science is physics. Yet physicists are keenly aware that their science is not settled and not satisfying. In fact, they have suffered from a huge itch and they created the CERN project to scratch that itch.”
Actually the examples were very carefully chosen – cherry-picked if you like.
I was fully aware of the skepticism that is still around about CFCs. I am well versed in the development of evolutionary theory and picked the heliocentric solar system because of the partial nature of its certainty in the larger context of our changing understanding of cosmology with Newton – Einstein – Gamow.
The examples were picked because there are some interesting aspects to the way the science changed around each of the issues, CFCs, evolution and heliocentricity.
The Khunian concept does not work (it was always just a passing paradigm!), such sciences are nearly always cumulative and evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Newton is not displaced by Einstein, but becomes a still accurate subset of the ‘larger’ explanation.
Genetics provided abundant new information, and an explanation of the hereditary process that expanded Darwinian ideas, but did not displace the underlying concept.
In the much simpler case of CFCs the development of the scientific understanding was much more dependent on technical advances in measurement. And the doubt and skepticism with which the hypothesis was initially greeted was driven in large part by commercial interests in blocking or delaying effective policy and regulation that was indicated by the science.
‘Settled science’ is often replaced by a better explanation that is richer in the range of observations that it can encompass. But such expansions in understanding rarely refute the established basics that already exist, they add, cumulatively to the body of knowledge rather than overthrow it.
When posters here dismiss ALL of climate science as a singular, independent entity within the larger world of science which is inherently mistaken or fraudulent they seem to me to be characterizing climate science as something like Lysenkoism. pseudo-science driven purely by the need to formulate theories in conformity with an ideological position rather than in response to observations.
Lysenkoism had a rather brief history because of its failure to provide successful results. It was never intergrated into the rest of science and did not have a long history of gradual development with numerous skeptical objections overcome by robust data over more than a century. In that way I fail to see the similarity.
Theo Goodwin says:
February 6, 2011 at 7:29 am
“You are not covering the entire story…
It is not possible to take the information provided by genetic studies and use it to retrodict the evolution of species through natural selection.”
I would dispute this claim. It may not always be possible, but the work on the genetics of the loss of eyes in fish that become cave-dwellers does show that genetics can be used to retrodict the evolution of such species.
@-
Vince Causey says:
February 6, 2011 at 8:25 am
“What you say is true, but irrelevant. All you have done is cherry picked a few examples for your ‘settled science’ against which only a few refinements were later made.”
Theo Goodwin says:
February 6, 2011 at 9:04 am
I should have added a very important practical point. Our most fundamental science is physics. Yet physicists are keenly aware that their science is not settled and not satisfying. In fact, they have suffered from a huge itch and they created the CERN project to scratch that itch.
Actually the examples were very carefully chosen – cherry-picked if you like. I was fully aware of the skepticism that is still around about CFCs. I am well versed in the development of evolutionary theory and picked the heliocentric solar system because of the partial nature of its certainty in the larger context of our changing understanding of cosmology with Newton – Einstein – Gamow.
The examples were picked because there are some interesting aspects to the way the science changed around each of the issues, CFCs, evolution and heliocentricity.
The Khunian concept does not work (it was always just a passing paradigm!), such sciences are nearly always cumulative and evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Newton is not displaced by Einstein, but becomes a still accurate subset of the ‘larger’ explanation.
Genetics provided abundant new information, and an explanation of the hereditary process that expanded Darwinian ideas, but did not displace the underlying concept.
In the much simpler case of CFCs the development of the scientific understanding was much more dependent on technical advances in measurement. And the doiubt and skepticism with which the hypothesis was initially greated was driven in large part by commercial interests in blocking or delaying effective policy and regulation that was indicated by the science.
‘Settled science’ is often replaced by a better explanation that is richer in the range of observations that it can encompass. But such expansions in understanding rarely refute the established basics that already exist, they add, cumulatively to the body of knowledge rather than overthrow it.
When posters here dismiss ALL of climate science as a singular, independent entity within the larger world of science which is inherently mistaken or fraudulent they seem to me to be characterizing climate science as something like Lysenkoism. pseudo-science driven purely by the need to formulate theories in conformity with an ideological position rather than in response to observations.
Lysenkoism had a rather brief history because of its failure to provide succesful results. It was never intergrated into the rest of science and did not have a long history of gradual development with numerous skeptical objections overcome by robust data over more than a century. In that way I fail to see the similarity.
Theo Goodwin says:
February 6, 2011 at 7:29 am
“You are not covering the entire story…
It is not possible to take the information provided by genetic studies and use it to retrodict the evolution of species through natural selection.”
I would dispute this claim. It may not always be possible, but the work on the genetics of the loss of eyes in fish that become cave-dwellers does show that genetics can be used to retrodict the evolution of such species.
@-
Vince Causey says:
February 6, 2011 at 8:25 am
“What you say is true, but irrelevant. All you have done is cherry picked a few examples for your ‘settled science’ against which only a few refinements were later made.”
Theo Goodwin says:
February 6, 2011 at 9:04 am
I should have added a very important practical point. Our most fundamental science is physics. Yet physicists are keenly aware that their science is not settled and not satisfying. In fact, they have suffered from a huge itch and they created the CERN project to scratch that itch.
Actually the examples were very carefully chosen – cherry-picked if you like. I was fully aware of the skepticism that is still around about CFCs. I am well versed in the development of evolutionary theory and picked the heliocentric solar system because of the partial nature of its certainty in the larger context of our changing understanding of cosmology with Newton – Einstein – Gamow.
The examples were picked because there are some interesting aspects to the way the science changed around each of the issues, CFCs, evolution and heliocentricity.
The Khunian concept does not work (it was always just a passing paradigm!), such sciences are nearly always cumulative and evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Newton is not displaced by Einstein, but becomes a still accurate subset of the ‘larger’ explanation.
Genetics provided abundant new information, and an explanation of the hereditary process that expanded Darwinian ideas, but did not displace the underlying concept.
In the much simpler case of CFCs the development of the scientific understanding was much more dependent on technical advances in measurement. And the doubt and skepticism with which the hypothesis was initially greeted was driven in large part by commercial interests in blocking or delaying effective policy and regulation that was indicated by the science.
‘Settled science’ is often replaced by a better explanation that is richer in the range of observations that it can encompass. But such expansions in understanding rarely refute the established basics that already exist, they add, cumulatively to the body of knowledge rather than overthrow it.
When posters here dismiss ALL of climate science as a singular, independent entity within the larger world of science which is inherently mistaken or fraudulent they seem to me to be characterizing climate science as something like Lysenkoism. pseudo-science driven purely by the need to formulate theories in conformity with an ideological position rather than in response to observations.
Lysenkoism had a rather brief history because of its failure to provide succesful results. It was never integrated into the rest of science and did not have a long history of gradual development with numerous skeptical objections overcome by robust data over more than a century. In that way I fail to see the similarity.
Mr Lynn
I have on a number of occasions posted broadly similar observations as those set out by ge0050 at February 5, 2011 at 1:35 pm under the title of THE ARGUMENT FOR BENEFICIAL GLOBAL WARMING. For example you might like to see my post of 5th February, 2011 at 1:51 pm on the “NOAA ENSO expert: “odds for a two-year (La Niña) event remain well above 50%” thread.
Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the benefits of living in a warm environment can be seen by comparing Stonehenge (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge ) with The Great Pyramid at Giza (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_pyramid ). Both were built at approximately the same time, approximately 2,500BC, ie., about 4,500 years ago.
I would not like to devalue the enormity of the task behind the building of Stonehenge which was an absolutely fantastic achievement, but it pales in insignificance behind that involved in the building of the Great Pyramid. Not merely upon the basis of the scale of each monument but also in the precision and building skills involved in the case of the Great Pyramid. In the latter, the base was chiselled out of the Giza Plateau to a horizontal accuracy of 21 mm over a length of 230 metres. We would be hard pressed to achieve such accuracy today. It must be remembered that this was achieved without the aid of self levelling liquids which we would use today. Stone blocks were chiselled and faced so that they could be set together with no more than a 0.5 mm gap between blocks. Compare this level of skill and craftsmanship with Stonehenge.
The reason why such a difference of skill had developed was that in Britain, it was a struggle to stay alive in the relatively cold climate such that time was spend on staying alive rather than developing what were unnecessary and not relevant skills. On the other hand in Egypt, life was easy. The climate was generally benign and this allowed man to develop at a quicker rate than his counterparts living in colder European climes.
Of course, I am not saying it is all down to warmer conditions. Available natural resources play their part but generally one can see a correlation between the date of development and warm environments. Historical evidence (of which there is plenty) would suggest that warmer conditions would be of significance to mankind.
izen says:
February 6, 2011 at 10:28 am
Theo Goodwin says:
February 6, 2011 at 7:29 am
“You are not covering the entire story…
It is not possible to take the information provided by genetic studies and use it to retrodict the evolution of species through natural selection.”
“I would dispute this claim. It may not always be possible, but the work for instance on the genetics of the loss of eyes in fish that become cave-dwellers does show that genetics can be used to retrodict the evolution of such species.”
I agree with the second part of your contradictory claim. Since you agree “It may not always be possible” then you agree with me. I accept that in some cases it is possible.