Evolution (Evolution)

by whitecraw, Wednesday, April 02, 2008, 21:52 (6077 days ago) @ David Turell

'"Economy of a theory" is an interesting concept. Occam would applaud, but that doesn't mean that it really explains anything. It is a very educated guess as to how one species "might" become another, and has not shown any sign of proof so far.' - Well, like it or not, economy is one of the criteria by which the relative merits of rival scientific theories are evaluated. Explanatory power is another. Scientific theories (unlike mathematical and logical theorems) are not susceptible to proof. - This hasn't always been the case. In the good old days, the only issue was whether or not a theory is true; and the only problem was how this could be determined. But by the early 20th century, comparative evaluation of scientific theories became an increasingly important issue for working theoretical scientists. The 20th century saw the development of a number of new scientific theories with unexpected characteristics, which broke ontologically and methodologically with earlier theories and which revealed just how problematic the determination of the truth-value of a theory is. This was most notable in the case in physics. - In part as a consequence of the perceived methodological and ontological breaks between theories, a number of relativistic theses arose within the science. On the one hand, the variation in the content of scientific theories in the history of science led to the denial of scientific realism, and even of the progress of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, given the variation of the norms of scientific method, it was denied that there may be any rational grounds for the judgement that one theory is objectively better than another. A number of different approaches were proposed in response to these radically sceptical theses, and these approaches lead to non-foundationalist and non-realist accounts of scientific methodology. The debate about these issues continues to be very lively. - Basically, during the course of the 20th century, the pre-modern 'naïve realist' or 'intellectualist' view of scientific theory (that it strives to represent faithfully in ideas the way things 'really' are, quite apart from and independent of the linguistic resources we employ in making that representation) was superseded by a succession of more 'functional' views, which generally hold that scientific theories are technological devices that help us make our way in the world, and that their 'truth' resides in their usefulness rather than in their correspondence to objective reality, the measurement of which correspondence is problematic. - The bottom line is that the best of a bunch of rival theories is nowadays the one which: - a)	is falsifiable, but which has not yet been falsified by experiment;
b)	can account for everything it is proposed to account for ... i.e. 'works';
c)	has the potential to account for other things besides;
d)	is the simplest (in conceptual terms) of the range of theories available;
e)	generates further problems and, with them, ongoing programmes of research. - 'The evidence is that evolution proceeded from very simple to very complex for no good reason as based on the passivity of the Darwin Theory.' - I'll refrain from pointing out for a third time the erroneous nature of the assumption that evolution is progressive.