If it’s been a bit dead here today, it’s because I’ve been on an aeroplane most of the afternoon, and am now holed up in the lovely little village of New York for a few days of urban thrills.
While I was cruising through the skies, Vox Day has responded to my rebuke of his pathetic anti-scientific efforts. He’s now claiming that if evolution were capable of rates of 200,000 darwins, then we could turn a mouse into an elephant in 20 years, and since we haven’t, then evolution is bogus.
I trust Pharyngula readers are smart enough to see the obvious logical hole. That evolution does not proceed at an extravagant rate dictated by a creationist does not call evolution into question in the slightest. As I mentioned, those extreme rates are observed in extreme experimental situations and involve changes in size of a few percent over short intervals in small and prolific invertebrates. No biologist claims elephants shot up over the span of decades, and it is entirely inappropriate to pretend that those kinds of rapid transformations should apply to the situation Day invented.
An “aeroplane”? What, pray tell, is that? Is it like a Sopwith Camel?
It wasn’t enough that you guys evolved a roadkilled skunk into his haircut in just a few months?
(Eppur si muove!)
Applying one dimensional thinking to multidimensional concepts is a recipe for stupidity.
It is like unto an “airplane”, but has more brass fittings and is steam powered.
Yeah, but Chris, he was using the power of Jebus to do that, not evolution.
Long ago, I used to play golf. Funny thing about golf, you always go out expecting to play your best game ever. So if you average 100 for 18 holes, but once you shot an 80, then by golly every time you play you expect to shoot an 88.
Sounds like Vox is falling into this fallacy. Extending the absolute maximum rates of evolution to every situation. Don’t know if his math is correct, don’t really care. The basic premise is so absurd to begin with.
I read Vox’s original article and saw something fun in the comments that I think would be an interesting exercise:
“I don’t even think evolution is falsifiable anymore since the very definition changes with new evidence, and there are competing theories of evolution.
Can an evolution proponent tell me three tests that would invalidate their favorite theory of evolution? And if it did invalidate their favorite would it have any effect on the fact that they believe evolution is true?”
I can think of two off the top of my head. (And the answer to the second question… DUH.) I’d love to see your take on it.
Anyone notice Vox Day’s soon-to-be-published book on Amazon?
The subtitle on the page reads, “Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.”
But the subtitle on the picture says, “Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.”
What’s up with that? I suppose taking on all four would invalidate the nifty phrase “Unholy Trinity”.
Well, he wouldn’t be the first wingnut who commits to print that he can’t count, although at least Horowitz did make his error at two orders of magnitude higher than 3.
Getting things completely wrong in one post is called a Vox Unit.
Give them a break, Cody. These are people who have to perform amazing feats of twisted logic to explain that the three gods they worship (father, son, and spirit) are really the same god, otherwise they’d be breaking the first commandment of their god, err gods… I mean, triune god of singularity known as Elohim.
Because some very special aeroplanescan reach Mach 2 all aeroplanes must reach Mach 2 in order to fly.
Same non-logic.
I am simply left at stunned incredulity right now. Yes. Compare the marine invertebrates to the mouse for no reason other than failed sophistry.
Some one needs to remind this clown that evolution DOES happen at speeds that his is talking about-in the case of bacteria, just a few years.
Come to think of it, in the geologic time scale, it is not just possible-it is inevitable.
yeah, yeah, Vox is a bit touched, yadda, yadda. We’ve all seen that for ourselves by now, surely? The important part of this post is that PZ is in NY! So will we stalkers…ahem…fans be able to meet up somewhere? There are several science-minded atheists in this city, I believe.
Incidentally, the “unholy trinity” at least exist, and are not a figment of someone’s imagination. And, they have not made “the perfectly idiotic and absurd”(words of Robert Ingersoll)claim of being one and the same.
#6
Three falsifiables? I suppose a truly “Intelligent Design” that *was* intelligent, irrefutiable natural, and “irreduciably complex. So far as I know there is no such example our any reason to believe there should be one but that’d do it for me.
I suppose isolated populations following same (not similar to the environment but *same* biological change). Oh, spontaneous generation. Digging twenty miles into the earths core and finding a gigantic computer system with an assembly date of October 26, 2004 B.C. Any number of weird things.
My main concern if any of these odd things occured, isn’t that they dispute evolution as I know it but that they’d be inconsistant with the consistant evidence so far. I don’t think anything can *falsify* evolution anymore than anything can falsify newtonian physics. But things could supercede it.
Anyway, I was amused that someone asked “What could falsify Creationism” and one person answered “God coming down and saying ‘that’s not how I did it'”.
This is unrelated to the topic, but I was hoping someone might be able to point me to a previous post that I can’t seem to find. Some time last summer, I believe, PZ posted a comic showing the dilemma believing embryos are people poses: if a clinic is on fire, do you save a two-year old child or a vial of frozen embryos? Does anyone remember this?
Yes, I noticed Vox’s book on Amazon… it’s not out yet, but I was highly amused by the answer to Amazon’s question “What Do Customers Ultimately By After Viewing Items Like This?” Well, obviously:
Letter to a Christian Nation – S.Harris
Atheist Universe – D.Mills
God Is Not Great – C.Hitchens
… Buy….
Krista:
With people like “Vox Day,” I think we need to work on our own version of “Then why are there pygmies and dwarfs?” I suggest something like this:
“So, I hear Christians worship donkeys on sticks. If you’re a Christian, where’s your donkey?” and just keep repeating it. See how long it takes for them to get rude.
I’m in NY all right, but I’ve got a busy schedule. I might be free Saturday night, and will post something if I am…I’m staying down near Union Square. Maybe we can work out something.
ecpyrosis,
I agree…I’m in NY and would like a visit.
Secondly, I read all of Vox the other DAY and started shivering. The foolishness of the masses. Its really scary…they had ~300 posts in one day on the article!!
Just wondering. Is Theodore “Vox Day” also known as “The Beaver”?
Am I missing something? I thought that the logical hole is that elephants take twenty years to reach sexual maturity…
Am I missing something? I thought that the logical hole is that elephants take twenty years to reach sexual maturity…
That’s why you have to start with the mouse and evolve the elephant in twenty years. Starting with the elephant and evolving a mouse in twenty years is just plain silly.
“What would falsify evolution?”
Haldane had the answer to that:
“Rabbits in the Cambrian”
(Or was it pre-Cambrian?)
You get the idea, though.
I must disagree with frog (comment #20) on falsification.
Not that I have studied the thinking about this. But when we falsify theories the scope of falsification vary, from just rejecting a parameter range of some model to rejecting the whole theory as impossible. (Or more often, as incomplete. Such theories are often kept as simple approximation, in applicable ranges, to the replacement.)
Another aspect is that we should probably only expect that a phenomena described by these theories are realistically falsifiable before the weight of evidence makes it firmly established. Evolution as the phenomena of “common descent” is too established to be rejected now. woozy mentions interesting observations that could have falsified it (constant change) but that was never observed.
What can be tested and replaced (“modified”) is the theories describing evolution and its mechanisms.
ID is non-falsifiable as long as it doesn’t offer mechanisms that allow predictions. Other theories describing acting agents does this, for example forensics, and they have no problem with testing.
IC is a special hypothesis here, because it is independent of “design” ideas and have only partial overlap with them, and is offering falsification. And not surprisingly, it is falsified.
It is true that Aristotle’s astronomy was replaced before it was tested. There are several reasons behind that, mainly that early “empirical” theories weren’t formulated in testable form.
Later on it seems to me early scientists didn’t appreciate the power of tests. They concentrated on correct (and simplest) descriptions of the already known instead of comprehending the mechanisms. Compare Linneaus with Darwin.
Aristotle’s astronomy was more philosophy than testable science. However, it offers one testable fact: if the earth and stars is fixed, we should not see stars moving. And 1838 the first stellar parallax was measured. Aristotle’s theory failed its test when the test was available.
I must disagree with frog (comment #20) on falsification.
Not that I have studied the thinking about this. But when we falsify theories the scope of falsification vary, from just rejecting a parameter range of some model to rejecting the whole theory as impossible. (Or more often, as incomplete. Such theories are often kept as simple approximation, in applicable ranges, to the replacement.)
Another aspect is that we should probably only expect that a phenomena described by these theories are realistically falsifiable before the weight of evidence makes it firmly established. Evolution as the phenomena of “common descent” is too established to be rejected now. woozy mentions interesting observations that could have falsified it (constant change) but that was never observed.
What can be tested and replaced (“modified”) is the theories describing evolution and its mechanisms.
ID is non-falsifiable as long as it doesn’t offer mechanisms that allow predictions. Other theories describing acting agents does this, for example forensics, and they have no problem with testing.
IC is a special hypothesis here, because it is independent of “design” ideas and have only partial overlap with them, and is offering falsification. And not surprisingly, it is falsified.
It is true that Aristotle’s astronomy was replaced before it was tested. There are several reasons behind that, mainly that early “empirical” theories weren’t formulated in testable form.
Later on it seems to me early scientists didn’t appreciate the power of tests. They concentrated on correct (and simplest) descriptions of the already known instead of comprehending the mechanisms. Compare Linneaus with Darwin.
Aristotle’s astronomy was more philosophy than testable science. However, it offers one testable fact: if the earth and stars is fixed, we should not see stars moving. And 1838 the first stellar parallax was measured. Aristotle’s theory failed its test when the test was available.
Sorry, I read Vox’s “clever stock analysis system” self-laud, and started laughing so hard that my morning coffee came out of my nose. Unpleasant, anatomically inappropriate, and a waste of good coffee.
Aren’t y’all just feeding his narcissistic supply by responding to him, providing more hits on his blog, and checking the Amazon link?
Everyone is writing, or soon-to-be publishing, a “book” these days. *rolls eyes*
IF ‘plate tectonics’ are responsible for observed vertical shifts in the earth’s crust of ten meters or more per day, AND those same ‘plate tectonics’ are claimed to be the force that created mountain ranges (2 km high or more), how come we have observed no new mountain ranges in recent history?
I thought the reason we hadn’t evolved elephants from mice is that nobody’d been trying.
I thought the reason we hadn’t evolved elephants from mice is that nobody’d been trying.
It’s because it would be unethical to breed an animal that was scared of itself.
The response to “bunnies in the Cambrian” has been twofold from Vox’s supporters (and VD himself) — if they did find them, it would be covered up, or “they’d just change the theory.” Damn — changing science to include new information is a flaw ?
Slightly off topic. On the humorous side of ‘trilogy’ rather than trinity. In Isaak Asimov’s autobiography, I Asimov, he relates that the first book cover art for Foundations Edge had the following: A new forth book in the Foundation Trilogy. Publishers and artists are perhaps bad at kitchen table math. Of course Douglas Adams founded a career on his ‘increasingly inaccurate’ Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy trilogy.
then we could turn a mouse into an elephant in 20 years
Just give me a bicycle pump and I’ll do it in twenty minutes! And then put it on display in a creationist Museum.
#28
woozy mentions interesting observations that could have falsified it (constant change) but that was never observed.
Aw, thanks!
ID is non-falsifiable as long as it doesn’t offer mechanisms that allow predictions.
ID is non-falsifiable because it doesn’t have anything. I’d be perfectly willing to accept (theoretically) that an observed example of “intelligent design” would be a falsification of the currently assumed mechanics of mutation and natural selection.
I confess, I chickened out of the “rabbit in the cambrian” (although I’d have used the billion year old hippo of the Vox comments) because I probably *would* view one lone rabbit as a hoax or misclassification or something negligable. BTW, what *is* the deal with cielocanths? Is it true the genentic difference of the modern cielocanth is equivalent to only five million years from the fossil records when it “ought” to be several hundreds of millions? If so… well, if so, what the aitch is going on?
I realized as I was thinking of falsifications there’s a large difference between falsifications that would supercede a theory and falsifications that would prove it wrong. Relativity superceded Newtonian physics which is today as valid as it ever was. Aristotlian laws of motion (I don’t know his views on Astronomy) have been proven to be just false.
Were “intelligent design” to be ever found and verified it would supercede neo-Darwinism. Rabbits in the Cambrean would just throw the whole evolution thing out. To do a law of motion analogy, reletivity superceded Newtonism. Discovering a spot on the earth where things fall up or a planet with the mass of jupiter and no gravity would throw Newtonian physics out. But such is inconcievable as Newtonian physics has been “proven” to the extent that anything has been. As has evolution. We simply *aren’t* going to find rabbits in Cambrian.
rjb #74:
I was accused of making an ipse dixit argument. Granted, I had to look that up, but it made me chuckle when I saw the definition (an unsupported assertion). Oh the irony!!
I’ve been looking for a term I could use when I dismiss the unsupported assertions incessantly spouted by creationists (“unsupported assertion” is a bit cumbersome, and doesn’t have any bite to it). It seems you’ve slogged through the muddled muck of a Vox Populi discussion thread and emerged with the perfect pejorative stuck to your boots. I can’t wait to drop into a few creationist forums and start stamping “ipse dixit, bitch!” on a few of their claims.
You mean…
“IPSE DIXIT, BIATCH!”
Hey. I live in Brooklyn.
Ugh… I don’t know how I managed to post my comment (#37) here when I meant to add it to this thread.