cole grey said:
SILAS,
The simplest theory that fits "all the facts", is not necessarily true.
Name a single counter-example.
cole grey said:
Will you predict which evolutionary theory is correct, based on simplicity, and based on our available facts, with Occam's razor? Good luck. If Darwin is wrong about his one-level emphasis, based on recent findings, will that make him correct up to now, or will someone who advocated a heirarchical idea in his era be more correct? More complex, and more correct?
It's not really Darwin you should mention in this respect. Darwin advanced the best theory around as to how complexity can evolve through random mutation strained through the extremely tough sieve of
non-random survival or non-survival. Nobody doubts that the driving force for evolution is still at the level of the individual organism. The controversy to which you refer is best represented by the division between Richard Dawkins, who strictly feels that since genes are carried in individual bodies, it is only individual organisms which can evolve, and the model believed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, who felt that some
species survival is driven by
species level selection. I'm afraid I don't fully understand the arguments on either side, so I'm not going to pick one. But let us say that Gould's concept prevails. In order for it to do so, there would have to be evidence of some kind of evolutionary development which would prove (by genetic or mathematical analysis) that species selection is also an operating factor that drives evolution. But in this case, Gould's total theory (including the one-stage theory of genetic mutation and selection first proposed by Darwin but augmented by the work on genetics by Mendel, mathematical genetics by R.A. Fisher and others and even Watson and Crick with their enumeration of the DNA molecule) - this total theory then would then become the
simplest theory which fit
all the known facts - something that Natural Selection on its own would fail to do. The fact that the real theory is more complex than an earlier theory does not in fact invalidate Occam's Razor by one iota. I already explained this once by reference to Newton's simple theory and Einstein's immensely more complicated (not to say counter-intuitive) one. Newton's theory is simpler, but it does not account for all the facts, and therefore it "falls by the wayside". Nonetheless, by Occam's Razor we still eliminate unnecessary entities when dealing with everyday practical matters and use Newton's theories of forces and motion when relativistic effects are not going to be noticed - to quote
Apollo 13, Jim Lovell said "Well, gentlemen, we just put Isaac Newton in the driving seat." Newton's theory was less correct - at the tenth decimal place or whatever - but it was certainly good enough and beautifully simple enough to program into the primitive computers of the Apollo missions, for example.
cole grey said:
Re: God - what are "all the facts"? You misapply Occam's method for researching a scientific theory's veracity to an area where the "facts" are sparse, or non-existent, or ubiquitously abundant, depending on who you ask, because the researchers can't even agree on which "facts" are to be included in the proving process. Some people claim that everything is planned by God, some that everything is chance, some take a middle road - prove to me which view should be used to gather the "facts".
I think you totally misunderstand the scientific method - facts are gathered with no particular view in mind at all. But ever since Newton our exploration of the world around us has revealed that everything is governed by comprehensible laws and subject to analysis by mathematics. As each new discovery is made and found to fall within that paradigm, it is only natural to assume that the next level down, the next thing to be found, is also based on some natural, mathematical, law. So as evidence is gathered the scientists try to think up mathematical laws which will govern things so that they appear the way we see them. After three hundred years of success in this direction, it would be foolish to stop at
any point and say "from this point on it must have been God". Even if we reach a point past which it is
impossible for us to find the underlying law, we must still strive to do so, until we find absolute unavoidable proof that a conscious intelligence was undoubtedly responsible for something.
