That doesn't refute my point. Noether's theorem holds true even if the action of physical systems don't have any differentiable symmetry. The theorem says that such systems have conservation laws, not that our universe is such a system.
Does the theorem not work on the gravitational laws?
No. My opinion was that IF we have 99.999% of the puzzle, then we basically know what's going on. It is a separate matter to know THAT we have 99.999% of the puzzle.
I would agree, however if we don't know that we have 99.999% we can't possibly know that we basically know what is going on.
Which wasn't my point. My point is that not having 100% of the evidence doesn't preclude us from making decisions. If we have 90%, 95%, 99%, we can still come to conclusions: we can bring the murderer to trial, we can conclude the veracity of evolution, etc.
Of course. We can make decisions based on what we know, but we can't claim that the conclusions are correct because we don't know everything we need to know can't be quantified. We can know what we know but what we don't know might change everything we thought we knew.
My point is that it is incorrect to insinuate that we must have absolutely every iota of possible evidence before we can come to conclusions, and that if we have a gnat's breath less than 100% then we cannot come to any conclusions.
You are arguing on the basis that we have the higher percentage of knowledge when in fact, we can't know what percentage we are working with. If we base a conclusion only knowing .01 % of all available criteria we are going to be lacking a great deal of information. IF we feel that we have 99.999% of the information when in fact we only have .01% our conclusions will be substantially insufficient. We have seen this time and time again in science. We think we know for all most certain that something is so, and then we grow more technically advanced and find we didn't know what we thought we knew. Which is fine, that is the reason behind the whole process. We just have to keep in mind that nothing is set in stone in the scientific arena.
Key phrase: "The fact that we don't have every fossil in existence means that we have only pieces of the puzzle. Which means we don't have the entire picture of life and its history", implying that not having every fossil in existence is somehow to our detriment. What matters is the fossils we do have, not the fossils we don't.
That simply is not true. If we have only .01% of all available fossils on earth how do we arrive at the conclusion we have all we need to make any real conclusion? Take whale evolution. There is only 10 million years or so for the evolution needed to evolve to the modern whale. If there is a modern whale fossil that is found before that period of time it changes everything. If we were to find a modern whale 100 million years earlier it changes the whole picture.
We have millions of fossils overflowing museum drawers, and they all without exception point to the features predicted by evolution (correct distribution in strata, correct geographical distribution, correct radiometric dates, correct anatomical and skeletal changes, etc).
It doesn't matter how many there are if it only comes to .01% of the entire possible fossil record. We base our dating on a rather circular criteria. We base our evolutionary distribution on what we have found in the strata and we sometimes base our strata on what is found in it. We see life forms in a strata and we place that life form as arising in that strata if we don't find any fossil evidence prior to that strata, however, many times we later find that same life form millions of years earlier than predicted.
Actually, the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago left open huge ecological niches, and we see a flurry of new forms and features develop to fill that gap. Flowering plants themselves are only 140 million years old - this means that something as mundane as fruit is relatively new, geologically speaking.
I am not sure what point you are making here.
However, what makes you think we should see something more than a bird evolve into another species of bird? Evolution demands that birds only evolve new bird species. If a bird species ever evolved into a mammal species, then evolution would be disproven at is most fundamental level.
I am saying that we should see the same type of branching that we have had in the past which take the organism in a completely different path and we don't see that in the last millions of years.
I still don't know what you expect evolution to produce. I still need an answer to that most basic of questions: What do you mean by "transitions in the same vein as in the past"? What do you mean by "species to species evolution"? What do you mean by "we should see something more"? I ask for examples because I don't actually know what it is you're asking.
I would expect from evolution the same as has been throughout time. We should see during that time the branching off of life forms as in the past.
Then you understand that 'transitional species' is not a proper piece of evolutionary jargon. The term would apply to all individuals of all species. I am a transition from my mother to my daughter, as is my mother before her, and her mother before her. Each woman holds hands with her daughter and her mother, going all the way back through the generations. Each individual looks basically the same as their immediate ancestor and immediate descendant, but if we go back tens of thousands of generations, we see a smooth change.
There is no 'transitional' form, as there is no transition.
Would intermediate be a better word?
