Re: poly: Modeling Economic Singularities

From: Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Thu May 07 1998 - 10:40:27 PDT

"Peter C. McCluskey" writes:
> I'd love to see him apply his standard to a debate between evolutionary
> biologists and creationists. [Where are the fossils showing X evolved to Y?
> Z wouldn't work without all its 32 parts. Where are the tests showing those
> parts could have been created by random processes?]

"Creationism" is as much hypothesis as evolution. It has close to zero
evidence. Evolution has substantial, but imperfect, evidence. The
creationists therefore likely lose.

I would argue, however, that in the course of your sarcasm you've
pointed out an interesting problem -- the "very very slow incremental
changes" theory of evolution doesn't explain many sorts of things,
like, say, the lenses in eyes, very well. That is not to say that
creation is correct -- but it is to say that your notion that the
evidence for the standard darwinian models of how evolution has
proceeded is insufficient is not far from the truth.

> >I'll bet they do not, however, always stay silent about their theories
> >until tests back them up. And do they always insist on years of experiments,
> >rather than just tests on historical data, before risking capital?
>
> My impression is that many of them don't have the patience to wait
> for more than a few days.

Is your impression based on experience? Mine is.

Perry
Received on Thu May 7 17:51:21 1998

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