Evolutionary and Global Warming Theory: Predictable Responses with No Empirical Evidence

How terribly depressing to see someone preaching creationism on this site. The warm mongers often level the criticism that us “deniers” are so dumb that we are creationists and flat earthers too. I had always presumed that it was just name calling, but seeing the article here and some of the comments, I am just profoundly sad. I invite creationists to go watch Richard Dawkins on YouTube.

Come on guys; surely you can admit that there are difficulties with current theories about the origin and development of life without signing up to a philosophical or religious position?

Or maybe that is the problem; religious believers have a choice of beliefs about origins: evolution directed by God (Francis Collins, Mary Schweitzer) young earth creationism (Morris), intelligent design (Wilder Smith). Atheists don’t: if Darwin fails their world falls apart

Climate change is the religion for those who think they’re too smart for religion. At its most basic level “EvolutionDiddit” is no more intellectual than “GodDiddit”.

All I got was arm-waving and references, but not one piece of empirical evidence to prove the theory. This is the same response you get when you ask for empirical evidence to prove the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW)

Let’s stop right there, because as a foundation statement on which to base the article, it is as egregious a straw man as any climate alarmist would use.

Worse, if it is held to be a representation of the way science works, it is as benighted and ignorant a statement as a Michael Mann would make.

In what universe does ’empirical evidence’ ‘prove’ a scientific theory?

Certainly not the one I inhabit, or Karl Popper, or indeed any other philosopher of science.

Whilst there is argument about much of what Popper wrote, there is indeed broad agreement that the nature of scientific theories – and indeed all statements of logic of an inductive nature – is that they cannot be ‘proved’ and certainly not by ’empirical evidence’.

Indeed the total thrust of Popper’s work ‘Conjectures and Refutations’ is that the role of evidence is to refute the conjecture, or hypothesis, and if the conjecture can’t in principle be refuted at all – like for example saying ‘God is Great’ without any definition of what is meant by ‘God’ or Great’ or a statement like ‘We live in a a material world and that is all there is’ it is considered a metaphysical statement. Now I have my own ideas about what the purpose and use of metaphysical statements are, but for the moment one may simply affirm Popper’s position, that metaphysical statements do not cannot and should not form part of any scientific theory.

So that is one of Popper’s criteria. A theory should not be metaphysical, i.e. it should be, in principle, capable of refutation. And by refutation it is understood that we mean ‘shown to be in conflict with empirical evidence that is commonly held to be ‘true”.

In addition a theory should predict something that was not predicted before. This is less Popper, more Occam. Theories that predict the same outcomes as existing theories are pointless.

Note however that there is an interesting implication buried in Occam. And indeed Popper. Neither make any claim whatsoever concerning the truth content of theories. And this is where most run of the mill scientists with no appreciation of what science really is, come unstuck. They consider that the fact that a theory works, or seems to work, implies that there is truth content in it. And the fact that it hasn’t been refuted by the evidence becomes, in their minds, a statement that the ’empirical evidence’ ‘supports the theory’, and the theory is ‘correct’ and ‘true’.

This is a massively important point and is at the heart of so much misconception by the popular mind, and indeed my most scientists too. Who believe that science and the scientific method can in some sense arrive at the truth, and prove it to be correct.

This is entirely false. What science can and does do is establish models of the world – like AGW and Darwins theory, that can be shown to both predict future events, and can, in principle be shown to be wrong, when compared with empirical evidence. Science is inductive. Sherlock Holmes did not practice deduction, but in fact induction. One does not deduce a theory from known facts, one constructs a hypothesis from known facts, and tests it to see if it is consistent with all of them.

Deduction is an exact methodology for explicating facts implicit in an axiomatic proposition.

E.g. given the axioms of plane geometry – the definitions of what a line, an angle, a plane and flatness actually MEAN, it is then possible to deduce all the geometrical theorems from those basic propositions. The three angles that constitute a triangle IMPLICITLY add up to either a half circle of rotation for the inside ones or a full circle for the outside ones. This can be proven to be incontrovertibly true.

Deduction is the art of unfolding – explicating – knowledge about a theoretical object – a triangle for example, from the implicit properties inherent in the definition of what a triangle is.

Deductive logic is how we test a proposition., IF statement A is true THEN Statement B is true.

And that is how we test scientific theories. IF the earth is flat THEN it has an edge ….

But deductive logic is not commutative. The existence of an edge does not make the proposition that the ‘world is flat’ TRUE. At best it makes it only ‘not demonstrably false’.

This is where Tim Ball’s article becomes nonsense and a total straw man. It is not down to us to prove evolutionary theory to be ‘true’ using ’empirical evidence’. It is down to him to refute it, using ’empirical evidence’.

So what is science really all about then? It is obviously not what Tim thinks it is. Philosophers of Science have pondered the issue, but the broad consensus is that there is no ‘inductive method’ by which we can arrive at the truth. That is not how it works.

No one is sure how we construct hypotheses, but its fairly obvious why we do. It is far easier to deal with general rules about the world, than with every single case on its own merits. As humans we feel that – and our survival is reasonably supportive of such a general thesis – that there is an order in the world of our experience. Stuff doesn’t just happen by chance. This is a metaphysical statement. We start by making a general statement to ourselves that the world of our experience is governed by some sort of invisible entities – Gods, or Natural Laws – that constrain it to be the way it appears to be rather than another way it might appear to be. Western culture at least does not shrug its shoulders and say insha’Allah.

From this perspective it is fairly easy to understand religions as simply colourful qualitative attempts to describe the way the world works. In which personalities – the Gods – constrain things that happen. As such once the deities are depersonalised to become natural laws, we have the Enlightenment picture of the world, as not governed by sentient personal entities, but by blind mechanistic laws. And it is this particular mechanistic metaphysical proposition that science addresses itself to and analyses..

This view of the world is useful, and it works. Instead of saying ‘that snake, because it is of the species Bitis arietans is dangerous, and should be avoided’, we simply say ‘all snakes are dangerous’ .

This is less true a statement, but it is functionally more effective. Since not much good comes from snakes, but a lot of harm may, there is no real problem in indulging what the modern politically correct mind would probably call ‘specism’ in bundling all snakes into category ‘avoid’.

So deriving simple general rules about the world, even if they are not really accurate or totally true, is something we have found to be useful. It is in our natures to do this. Science is the most polished and precise example of this that we have.

Looked at from this perspective, (and you must decide if this perspective is informative or not) we can make some statements about knowledge and science in general.

1. All empirical knowledge is relative to a metaphysical structure of some sort. Because our direct raw experience is not of objects in space time. It is unformed and chaotic. Out of that we introduce criteria of space, time , materiality, causality and so on, and structure our experience in those terms. I personally consider that the fundamental mistake we make is to consider that these qualities exist in the real world, rather than in our perception of it. But that is a subject not germane to this issue here. So our so called ’empirical knowledge’ already has a huge subjective content. There is no such thing as objective empirical evidence, at best there are phenomena that we can agree about, because we interpret them in similar ways. If one man says ‘that tomato is red’ and another says. ‘I call that blue’ then we have an impasse.

2. Given that we agree on the metaphysics, we can then agree on the phenomena – what Tim calls the ’empirical evidence’ . This is as close to ‘undisputed truth’ as we will ever get. And sadly it is all about consensus. We agree on metaphysics by consensus. “The cat is sitting on the mat” is only empirical evidence if we all agree what is meant by all the words and have some knowledge of the general class of experience for which they are references. Again the average person implicitly and unconsciously assumes a 1:1 correlation between the world, as he describes it to himself using language, and the world, as it really is. This is once again functionally effective – but is manifestly not demonstrably true. The world, as we understand it, is just another theory about our experience.

Once we start splitting up the world into species of creature for example, some sort of relationship between species becomes a possibility, and with evidence of cross species breeding to produce new species – a mule is neither a horse nor a donkey – that relationship would seem to be mutable. Then if we look at the fossil record and consider that these creatures were in fact species that have died out and preceded our own existence (rather than having been placed their by Satan to distract us from the truth of Creation) then the idea of mutability over time is really not such a big leap.

3. So faced with empirical evidence of – say – interspecies breeding, and potential mutability of species over time – and dog breeding by humans is a massive example of that – the idea of formulating a conjecture that the evolution of species is constrained into the species we see today by natural selection is not so very far fetched, and represents a perfect example of how a scientific theory is and should be formulated. We have posited (NOT deduced) a general rule from a plethora of ’empirical evidence’ that seems to ‘explain’ that evidence and also gives rise to some useful predictions, that can be tested. One of which is that new species will not arise spontaneously having completely different characteristics from existing ones. The evidence of such an event would severely put Darwin into question, but, like apples falling upwards, with respect to gravity, it hasn’t happened yet…

4. Note that none of the above implies that Natural Selection, or indeed Gravity, are ‘real’ things that exist in the same way that species or apples do. Again this is a fundamental mistake made by most people. Gravity is not ‘real’ or ‘true’. The theory of Gravity posits a noumenous entity just as ‘spiritual’ as any pagan god, that governs the behaviour of amongst other things, apples.
(In metaphysics, the noumenon (/ˈnuːmənɒn/, UK also /ˈnaʊ-/; from Greek: νούμενον) is a posited object or event that exists independently of human sense and/or perception. The term noumenon is generally used when contrasted with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to anything that can be apprehended by or is an object of the senses.: Wiki)
That is, science may be considered to be a development of pagan and indeed Judaic ideas about the world as being governed at the intermediate level by angels or lesser gods…and as we have depersonalised the world, these entities have morphed into ‘natural laws’, but they still live in a realm that is one step (or more) removed from our direct experience. The only thing that marks science out from any other religious or other interpretations is that science is more functionally useful. i.e. it is more successful at predicting the outcome of events than other methodologies.

5. What this leads to – and here I am voicing a personal perspective, rather than what is consensus amongst philosophers – that knowledge is a hierarchy. At the bottom , is raw unformed experience. From raw experience we intuit, or develop a hypothesis, about the nature of the world that is metaphysical, We arrive at an understanding that the world is comprised of objects and events in space time connected by some form of causality. From the consequences of this, we can now actualise our experience into experience OF these entities. And develop languages – internal and external – in order to describe ‘what is happening’ in terms of these entities – like space, time, materiality, causality and so on. We cannot say that any of this is true however. We could be in the Matrix, and we could never, absent of a red pill, know different.

Once we have established a world view that does agree with the consensus metaphysics, we are free to add the next layer of knowledge. So that, taking our concepts and notions of time space energy materiality and causality, we are free to postulate theories that form even more general descriptions of classes of phenomena. This is where Western science parts company with Western (Semitic) religion. In order to do science, we find that the idea of personality in natural laws is inhibiting, so science is in the true and correct meaning of the word a-theistic. That is, it does not have anything to say about Gods. (Here we see the true stupidity of e.g. Dawkins. The functional effectiveness of science is not the same as it being true, and it therefore has nothing to say on the matter of religion, other than it doesn’t need it to do what science does).

At this level in the hierarchy we are now two steps away from the most real thing there is, our experience. (Unless you are a creationist, who hold that there is only one real thing, and that is the Word of God as laid down in the King James Bible.)

6. Taking the concept of the hierarchy of knowledge a bit further, we can see that, at the bottom lies raw experience, then above that is structured experience that can be described in language – the commonly held world of our perceptions – and from that we develop generalised theories about ‘what is going on’ that exist in a different level of thought all together, in theory space, so to speak. I find it very helpful to work out where any statements about the world belong in this model. If you like, the three levels described correspond to ‘what we subjectively experience as going on’, ‘what we commonly understand to be going on’ and ‘what is causing what is going on, to go on’. And the logical steps to pass downwards from a higher level to a lower is the logical process of deduction IF gravity behaves in such and such a way THEN apples will fall in such and such a way. Or going a layer below, IF such entities as apples exist THEN my experience of ‘appliness’ is consistent with that hypothesis. IF…THEN is deduction if it produces a logically irrefutable single conclusion. But the fact of apples falling DOES NOT PROVE GRAVITY.

In the reverse direction what seems to me to be the case is that we are in the business of constructing arbitrary and almost random hypotheses about the world. We imagine it to be almost anything, until one imagination or another seems to result in the reality we perceive being consistent with it. There is no such thing as ‘inductive reasoning’ . No means to arrive at the truth, just means to arrive at a plethora of hypotheses about the world, by constructing entities in ‘theory space’ whose existence will provide the causal linkages between phenomena that we desire.

So e.g. we cannot say IF apples fall THEN gravity exists. Because there might be many many other reasons why apples fall . IF Apples fall THEN they are sentient beings desirous of travelling to the earth where they will lay their seed upon it and thereby procreate’ . This is what William of Occam understood when he said more or less ‘Entities should not be constructed beyond necessity’ . The popular misconception that “the simpler theory is more true” as Wiki claims is a total misunderstanding of the statement. Once you realise that William, and others, realised that theories have no demonstrable truth content at all, the dictum becomes much easier to understand. Given that the best we can hope for in a theory is functional effectiveness, don’t pick elaborate complex ones. Even if they are true! The truth is outside of the sphere of competence of the theoretician.

Where this leaves the search for Truth of course, is up sh1t creek without a paddle. If you want Truth, just pick any religion and Believe In Its Final Truth and be thereby comforted. We are not in the business of seeking Truth as scientists, or indeed philosophers. No. We are in the business of exposing lies. And creating plausible explanations about the world as we commonly agree it to be, that can be tested to see if they are functionally effective which is as close as we can get to the Truth.

Darwin’s theory is a plausible useful explanation that predicts certain things that could be, but haven’t been, shown to be inconsistent with ’empirical evidence’ …yet… Darwin’s theory stands.

CAGW is a plausible explanation that predicts certain things that could be, and have been, shown to be inconsistent with ’empirical evidence’ . AGW falls.

It ill befits Tim to use the sort of logic and ignorant portrayal of science that is used by the CAGW believers to prove that Darwinism is wrong. CAGW is refuted on its own terms. Darwinism is not – yet.

That 97% of the total population including practising scientists do not know what in fact science really is, or its relationship with the truth, is, is a matter that is not – or has been not – especially problematic. As I have pointed out functional effectiveness is what humanity actually needs, not Truth, per se. And we use the word ‘truth’ when we mean ‘functional effectiveness’. But there is a downside to this shorthand – whilst many ideas about the same thing can be functionally effective, only one can be true. And therefore people who have grasped the idea of absolute objective Truth from religion, and seek to apply it to science, become like Dawkins, arrogant dogmatic buffoons, and objects of derision, to philosophers.

We posit the existence of an objective Truth, that the world is, to corrupt Wittgenstein, ‘whatever is the case’ Because its a functionally useful theory that there exists beyond us and our imaginations, a reality that is more or less there whether we are aware of it or not.

But the only truth we probably have, is that the exact nature of it, is forever unknowable. Science does not, and never has, discovered any part of its nature, beyond reasonable doubt. Science and indeed all human knowledge merely comes up with shorthand descriptions of it that are at best functionally useful.

The great triumph of science was to discredit explanations which were not true. Not-trueness is demonstrable. Because the linkage from theory space to phenomena is via deductive logic: IF theory A, THEN unequivocally specific prediction B. (This is another way of expressing Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, in that it implies the ability to construct such a statement. If the prediction is not specific or equivocal then its not science. ‘IF God THEN everything else’ is plausible, but not subject to falsification, because its not specific and its not unequivocal).

97% of the time its is not necessary to even touch philosophy with the soft end of a bargepole, but sometimes when you need it, you really need it. It seems to me reading the guff that passes for popular science and the position science is being placed in, in the popular mind, that now is one of the 3% of times when its really, really important to go back to first principles and get a clue as to what we really mean by truth, evidence, science, logic, deductions and so on. The amount of human conflict that is down to two camps each believing that they have a monopoly on the Truth is alarming. As is the massive abuse of peoples’ consciousnesses where they are led to believe generalities – like ‘all scientists are trustworthy’ – when in fact its demonstrable that all scientists these days are, – unlike Darwin – public sector employees, whose jobs depend on them being consistent with the policies of the governments of the time. Or employed by companies to further the aims of those companies.

I believe we must attack these certainties, that have served us well to date, because they are now no longer functionally effective. They cause more problems than they solve. We need a new level of sophistication in those who profess to be the custodians and the pioneers, of human knowledge.

Once we stop looking for the Objective Truth, and worse claiming that we have in fact found it, when its clear to me that we never can, then we can look at stuff like Science and Religion and judge them merely on how functionally effective they are at, in the case of Science, predicting the future, and, in the case of Religion, presumably making people feel a lot better about themselves than Karl Marx ever did.

Judged from this perspective, there is no conflict between them. Neither is the custodian of the One Truth. Both are limited attempts to produce a useful picture of the world.

People who are hung up on Truth, are a ready repository for every sort of lie.

People who understand that human knowledge is only true with respect to its metaphysical assumptions, and is at best barely approximate, are natural sceptics.

” All I got was arm-waving and references, but not one piece of empirical evidence to prove the theory. This is the same response you get when you ask for empirical evidence to prove the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW).”
Dr Ball, I have great respect for you, but what you’re saying here is complete nonsense.
There is a vast difference between Darwin’s theory and AGW. There isn’t a scrap of evidence that supports AGW, just a bunch of fantasy computer models adjusted to get the “right” answer.

In contrast, the world is filled with evidence that strongly supports evolution – and it doesn’t depend on dodgy computer models. Lots of the “missing links” have been found now – the fossils show how species have evolved over millions of years. We can see bacteria and viruses evolving almost minute by minute – this is causing the antibiotics crisis.

From our modern knowledge of genetics, evolution is completely predictable: each time the genetic code is copied to make a new generation – whether it’s elephants or bacteria – inevitably there will be copying mistakes, leading to often subtle changes in the genetic code. If the change makes the animal more successful – e.g. stronger muscles so it can run faster and longer – then the change will be carried on to later generations. If the change is bad, then the change will be weeded out, because it will be less likely to live long enough to have children.

I’m completely non-religious so I don’t have any religious beliefs to affect my judgement. I try to base my position on evidence and proof. I hate to say it, but I think anti-evolutionists are in the same boat as the AGW extremists. They are both more religion than science.
Chris

Lamaitre’s Big Bang, aplauded by Einstein as the greatest creation story he ever heard, simply relegates the essential question to a couple of fields. Einstein complained about Lamaitre lacking physics.
Who was it who quipped : “What was before the Big Bang – God was preparing Hell for those who asked.”

Leibniz tackled these questions in detail – of course the guard dogs at the door intend hell on anyone who goes there. Just a hint – what is the seat of “vis-viva” (todays kinetic energy) -the lump mass? He made a complete fool out of Descartes by asking just that metaphysical question, ending a dark age.

As regards Darwin – the Archaeopterix went extinct before modern birds, and is still to this day puffed up as the missing link (tourism?). Feathers were tried in the Biosphere while flight was grounded. Even everyone’s favorite Raptors groomed them. Evolution is much more like technology – “ideas” are often tried out and at some point the product clicks. It should sound familiar- we after all are from that very same biosphere.
But there is definitely a direction – higher metabolic rates , cephalization. Every “mass-extinction” preceded such jumps.
Darwin’s “creeping and crawling” might work for amphibians, but soaring, to borrow from flight, is more like what we do. Aristotle, Occam, Popper, Russell and Holmes, using deduction-induction, creeping and crawling, can never discover a new principle with no deductive pathway – the maths crowd insist it is straightjacketed afterwards. It is a great shame to see great physicists spend so much energy appeasing the symbolists, even after Russell’s program was demolished by Gödel,
So Darwin’s theory is basicly a political treatise on how to control thinking. The full title, somehow always glossed over is :
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
That is not science, rather imperial colonialism.