Metaphysics and evolution for Oholiab

In another thread Oholiab wrote:

When Darwin wrote Origin of Species he was proposing an argument based on an essay by Malthus which was not natural science nor natural history, it was natural philosophy. The principles out lined in the essay are based on the principle that drives empirical science and inductive scientific method. " experience is the true source and foundation of knowledge" (Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population). His essay and Origin of Species are arguments and elucidations (explainations) of theory, which is philosophy not natural science in the empirical sense. It is not only permissable for natural science to weave theory and practical considerations it is vital. The principle he elucidates is actually a common sense observation "Population increases geometrically, sustence increases arithmetical", in other words population increases faster then the enviroments ability to sustain life. The Malthusian model claims that 'divergence of character', which is another way of describing natural selection, is how survival is determined in nature. Anyone interested in the philosophy of science might want to check this out. This is the philosophical treatise that inspired the argument in Darwin's Origin of Species.
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.1.html

Click to expand...

1. In the early 1800s, "natural philosophy" was what we call "science" now.

2. Theories are explanations of data. They are also imagination. Contrary to popular opinion, hypotheses/theories are not compilations of data. Instead, they are imaginative constructs to explain data. They spring from the imagination. What ties them to reality is that they then must be tested against reality to see if they are accurate.

Mathus' essay triggered Darwin's imagination to find natural selection. It provided the missing idea Darwin needed to find the process that produces the design in biological organisms. The inspiration was: "Population increases geometrically, sustence increases arithmetical", As Oholiab says: "in other words population increases faster then the enviroments ability to sustain life." Darwin realized that this population increase would create scarce resources and that the individuals in the population would have to compete for those resources. This competition would select variations best designed for the competition, and then inheritance would preserve those designs.

3. Nowhere in Malthus do we see "The Malthusian model claims that 'divergence of character', which is another way of describing natural selection, is how survival is determined in nature. " Instead, Malthus says "The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it." Malthus simply says that population is restrained. It remained to Darwin to see that this restraint would result in an algorithm to get design -- natural selection.

Malthus is using the inequality of reproduction and resources to say that humanity and society cannot be "perfected". He is NOT saying anything about natural selection.

"This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society."

Now, Malthus did comment on what it takes for a new theory to survive.

"It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment. "

This accords with what Karl Popper said about theories in this century:

"I thought that scientific theories were not the digest of observations, but that they were inventions -- conjectures boldly put forward for trial, to be eliminated if they clashed with observations, with observations which were rarely accidental but as a rule undertaken with the definite intention of testing a theory by obtaining, if possible, a decisive refutation." The Arch of Knowledge, by David Oldroyd, Methuen, NY, 1986, pp 297-302.

Popper is focussing, rightly, on falsifying a theory. But it accords with the corollary to Malthus' statement: a wrong theory will always be disconfirmed or refuted or falsified by experiment.

Oholiab said:

Scientific evidence

Bacon developed the philosophy of natural science but it was Newton who actually established it.

Click to expand...

Others argue that Galileo was the founder of modern science and still others that it was Boyle.

The key to all of them is rejecting the Greek view that LOGIC ALONE dictated science. In order to evaluate hypotheses/theories, logic is not enough. You have to go an look to see if the physical universe is in accord with the hypothesis/theory.

“If the arrival of the modern scientific age could be pinpointed to a particular moment and a particular place, it would be 27 April 1676 at the Royal Society, for it was on that day that the results obtained in a meticulous experiment - the experimentum crucis - were found to fit with the hypothesis, so transforming a hypothesis into a demonstrable theory.” (White, the Last Sorcerer)

Click to expand...

White has an obvious misstatement here. And that is that a hypothesis "grows up" to be a theory. Instead, finding that the experiments fit the hypothesis gives you a SUPPORTED hypothesis. It does not transform a hypothesis into a theory.

There is not a hard and fast line between hypotheses and theories but, in general, hypotheses are specific statements about some specific aspect of the physical universe. An example of a hypothesis would be: fibroblast growth factor causes human skin fibroblasts to divide. The experiment is in accord with this and now the hypothesis is a supported hypothesis.

A theory is a more general statement about the physical universe. An example would be: fibroblast growth factor causes all types of cells that originate in the mesoderm of a mammalian embryo to divide. The supported hypothesis of human skin fibroblasts becomes a supported hypothesis WITHIN the theory. You have placed an overeliance on White and his story of the history of science.

It should be noted that the laws of science including natural selection had allready been well established well before Darwin.

Click to expand...

Natural selection originated with Darwin. It had never been established before. Where did you get this idea?

What he was proposing is a radical rejection of Aristotlean immunability of species to the point where now it is belived that everyone has a common ancestor.

Click to expand...

Yes, Darwin was also proposing this. Origin of the Species had two themes:
1. Mutability of species sometimes summed up as common ancestry or descent with modification.
2. Natural selection as the means of modification and the source of designs in biological organisms.

Now, Darwin supported both ideas with massive amounts of data. And the data has been rolling in ever since.

Gregor Mendel was the originator of modern genetics. Before Mendel the accepted theory for inheritance was "blended characteristics". It is one of the ironies of history that Mendel sent a copy of his paper to Darwin. But Darwin was really bad in foreign languages and, with all the other demands on his time, never took the time to translate Mendel's German.

The irony is increased in that natural selection doesn't work under blended characteristics. The favorable variation is diluted out by the blending. So it wasn't until the 1930s and 1940s when Mendelian particulate inheritance was applied to evolution that Darwinian evolution really came into its own.

Isnt it ironic that a monk is the father of modern genetics and was not recognised by the scientific community of his time. Yet Darwin's name is inextricable linked to natural selection and all he ever did was argue common ancestry and yet no identifiable phylogeny (descent fromshared ancestors) has ever been established clearly.

Click to expand...

Not much of an irony. Mendel was an amateur scientist and didn't participate in the scientific community that much. In contrast, Darwin was a world-renowned scientist even since the Beagle voyage -- 20 years before he published Origin -- and had served many years as Secretary for the Royal Geological Society (of which he was a member). It's too bad Mendel's work wasn't seen earlier, because then biology could have progressed faster with a correct theory of inheritance.

The last statement is contradicted by the data. There are many phylogenies established. This is particularly so among the invertebrate marine species. Lots of series of transitional individuals linking species and then linking several species to genera, families, orders, and even across class.

the science of biology was doing fine without naturalistic presumptions of these arguments of science falsely so called.

Click to expand...

Biology was hurting theology under special creation. There were just too many bad, stupid, and cruel designs in biological organisms for a loving, wise God if special creation were true. It's one reason that theologians accepted evolution before many biologists. Evolution got God off a really bad hook that special creation put Him on.

Biology iself was NOT doing fine. It was a group of isolated observations with no unity. As Dobzhansky famously said: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Evolution is not atheism.