Cenderawasih
Registered Member
Show me that demonstration and you win another stuffed bear 
I would argue that we can build better stuff because we're getting closer to understanding how nature works. If you want to dispute that, then you might need to come up with a better hypothesis to explain why we're able to build better stuff now than in the past. The argument that technological advance happens purely by accident is pretty weak, in my opinion. Can you do better?
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Again, you exaggerate, and I'm not sure why. Clearly, evolutionary biologists tend to agree on a great many things. The basic process of evolution by natural selection, for instance, has been part of biology since Darwin. Only a very foolish evolutionary biologist - or one with another agenda - would claim to disagree with that.
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Sure.If you can give me a paraphrase of the principle of natural selection that is not tautologous and thus not emirically vacuous I will buy you a stuffed bear.
Do you accept the challenge?
Sure.
Evolution by natural selection is the idea that species change over time in response to changes in the environment and as a result of competition between individuals within the species and with other species. The key ideas are that variation in individuals is produced at random (via various processes), and that individuals that are better adapted to the overall environment in which they find themselves preferentially survive to pass on inherited characteristics to the next generation.
I can expand on what "better adapted" means, if you like.
Newtonian mechanics isn't a "false theory", for reasons I explained above. It is perfectly adequate for getting us to the Moon, not so good for explaining the bending of light by the Sun, and so on.What you're doing is rehashing Hilary Putnam's "no-miracle argument", namely it would be a miracle if the success of science was a fluke and didn't hook up to reality.
The standard rejoinder is: It is already well established that false theories can yield accurate predictions. Newtonian mechanics got us to the Moon and all that.
No, but I know plenty of contemporary physicists who still use Newtonian gravity theory to calculate things, such as how to get a rocket to the moon.But I know of no contemporary physicist who still believes in an action-at-a-distance attractive force which acts instantaneously over any distance. Do you?
That's news to me. Got a quote/link?Oh but that was besides the point. Have the read the evo-devo folks? They tend to think natural selection is a load of bollocks.
Oh. How disappointing.And so do I. But I have no quotes.
It sounds like you want to have a discussion on a different topic than the one you started with. That would be better had in a different thread, I think.We may have to do this the old fashioned way, pal. Tell me about the predictive and explanatory power of natural selection. As far as I can discern, it has none.
Newtonian mechanics isn't a "false theory", for reasons I explained above. It is perfectly adequate for getting us to the Moon, not so good for explaining the bending of light by the Sun, and so on.
Okay...Now for a statement to even stand a chance of being true its subject term must refer. Get me? It must correspond to something in reality.
Sure. It's true that some kids love unicorns. For example.Do you believe anything true can be said about unicorns?
How do you know there exist no horse-like creatures with a single horn?If not, why not? Because there exist no horse-like creatures with a single horn?
??Do you believe anything true can be said about Newtonian gravity? If not, why not?
Compare what Newton's gravity says with what you see "in reality", I suppose.How do you determine whether Newton's "gravity" referred to anything in reality or not?
I'm surprised to learn that you believe the theory of natural selection has no explanatory power.
A specific discussion of the successes and failures of the phlogiston theory seems to me to be peripheral to the topic of this thread. Perhaps a topic for a different thread?May I see your demonstration?
Please remind me.Seems you read a lil phil of science, pal. Surely you know about the Duhem-Quine thesis?
Sure. It's true that some kids love unicorns. For example.
How do you know there exist no horse-like creatures with a single horn?