Posted by Walker on August 28, 1998 at 19:11:58:
In Reply to: Continuing from below posted by GaDS on August 28, 1998 at 16:26:58:
Responding to Chris's questions:
:1) You claim that scientists haven't been able to reproduce speciation. It is difficult to
respond this challenge because it isn't always clear what a person (even a professional
biologist!) means by speciation. What kind of experimental result would you count as a
reproduction of speciation?
A while back, rpcman provided a link to some studies on fruit flies and made the claim that speciation had been observed. But when I read closely, the "speciation" was really positive assortive behavior. Some forced matings produced infertile offspring (but only a percentage) That’s a start. Now if those studies had been carried a little further, watching the diverged flies for several more generations, and the two "species" didn’t converge back together, I would say that was very good replication in the lab, but I didn’t see it in that article.
:2) You claim that intelligent design in nature is a phenomenon that should be obvious to
anyone who looks close enough. But anyone who first assumes intelligent design will
certainly see all things in the light of intelligent desgin and the "theory" becomes
self-fulfilling. Unfortunately, intelligent design is not testable and it makes no predictions.
:2a) Can this "theory" be disproven in principle (as can evolution by natural selection), or is it
constructed in such a way that it assimilates every new observation? Can you describe one
(hypothetical) new observation or experimental result that would disprove, or even
challenge, the claim of intelligent design in nature?
Chris, It’s not clear to me how evolution by natural selection can be disproven in principal.
:2b) What does the theory of intelligent design predict? Describe an experiment that could test
this prediction. What might life on earth look like in a million years?
A million years from now? Evolution is also stumped on that one. However, once I read that predictions were made about fossils that would be found , like ancient whales with less vestigial rear limbs than modern whales have. Those fossils were then found. Unfortunately this is not the kind of prediction that can be repeated a lot.
Can the theory of intelligent design make predictions? Rpcman seems to imply with his list of goofed up creations from George Williams that intelligent design predicts no foul-ups in organism creation. GaDs, are those things really foul-ups or is intelligent design compatible with screwy biological features?
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