Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 03, 2008, 16:03 (6076 days ago) @ whitecraw

" 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.
> - > 
> I'll refrain from pointing out for a third time the erroneous nature of the assumption that evolution is progressive." - Whitecraw's view seems to make evolutionary 'progress' an illusion or accidental in its appearance. As I am still convinced that evolution shows directionality, I can refer to two differing competing theories of evolution by Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Gould declared that humans are a "glorious accident', and paraphrasing him, said that evolution was a series of congencies and that if the tape of evolution were re-run it was very unlikely that humans would show up again. In his defense, he based this on the Burgess Shale findings only with only one vertebrate animal, a fish. And his view, using his theory of repetative contingency, is reasonable. The odds mathematically are enormous against humans appearing. On the other hand Simon Conway Morris has done much more research on Chinese shale and has found a number of differing fish in the Cambrian Explosion. There is not a single line of contingency, but multiple lines of convergence, and Conway Morris states that humans are 'inevitable'. That certainly does reduce the odds for humans appearing. I think Gould jumped to his conclusion, and that Conway Morris appears to have the proper theory at the moment based on his discoveries. This conflict fits Whitecraw's discussion of what is scientific truth , at least for this moment in time.