re: #100 theotherwaldo

I don’t think that you understand what you are saying.

Science is a system of testing, not of belief. When you accept a scientific result, science ends and belief begins. Testing must be continuous, never-ending, otherwise science is meaningless.

I do not mean to imply that evolution did not occur and is not occurring. What I say is that the evolutionary record is incredibly sparse, with many false connections and incorrect assumptions. The evolutionary record has been completely re-arranged several times in my lifetime, and the changes are speeding up rather than slowing.

Freezing the record as it is now and teaching it as fact is doing a dis-service to our students, turning science into something else entirely.

-Ban me if you like.

Please furnish exampls of these alleged and purported ‘false connections’ and ‘incorrect assumptions.’

The evolutionary record is not being stringently ordered as we speak, as the genomes of more and more species are being decoded, and the degree of relation between them is precisely fixed. There have so far been no major surprises, only fine tuning on the periphery.

What is being taught is NOT being ‘frozen’; that’s what happens with religious dogmas, which are fixed like flies in ancient amber regardless of subsequent empirical evidence falsifying their contentions; the theories of empirical science continue to evolve, and to be augmented, elaborated and refined to assimilate and accommodate new experimental data. And yet, after 150 years, the core tenets of evolution remain as solid, valid, sound, and empirical-evidence-supported as any in empirical science.

The ‘god of the gaps’ argument progressively weakens, as the gaps continue to decrease and narrow, and there is no reason whatsoever to anticipate this trend not continuing until they for all practical purposes disappear entirely.

And just because there are some things that we DON’T yet know doesn’t mean that there aren’t a helluva lotta things that we DO know, and one of the things we know beyond rational statistical doubt is that evolution via random genetic mutation and nonrandom environmental selection has, over the past 3 1/2 billion years, resulted in the plethora of terrestrial species that we observe today. Because that’s what obsevably happens when populations of organisms possessing high but imperfect copying fidelity are confronted by surrounding ecologies comprised of specific challenges and opportunities.