The real alternative to design (Evolution)

by whitecraw, Friday, January 25, 2008, 00:13 (6146 days ago) @ kylie2002

This could have been enough to avoid a predator, which means that that individual's genes survive to breed. Through myriad accidental improvements, which are then favoured through natural selection, you end up with the human eye as it is today. - The trouble with Dawk the Dork's account of how stuff like eyes come about is that it's riddled with teleological (design) language; hence the speculation that rudimentary eyes 'evolved' because they helped prey avoid predators, that over time this rudimentary eye was 'improved' by being 'favoured' by natural selection. The only was to avoid design sneaking in the back door like this (and the way in which the theory of evolution by natural selection in fact avoids being ambushed in this way) is by understanding the process as a negative one. The incremental changes that led to eyes didn't survive because they each advantaged their bearers in the struggle for survival and reproduction in a given environment, but because none of them disadvantaged their bearers in that struggle. - Natural Selection, Evolution, whatever you want to call it, is more or less irrefutable. It is based on vast amounts of evidence, increasing all the time, and the clincher is that there has never been any new evidence which has not fitted the "theory". - This would make the theory of evolution by natural selection a non-scientific or 'bogus' theory. Two of the distinguishing marks of a scientific theory properly so-called is that it is capable of falsified (that is, that we can specify a set of observations that would falsify the theory if they ever were made) and that it generates anomalous results which stimulate further theory-development and experimental research programmes to explain. If the theory of evolution by natural selection were more or less irrefutable, and/or it doesn't generate anomalous results (that is, evidence which doesn't 'fit' or it can't explain), then it would be a scientifically bogus and sterile theory.