wrote in news:ve01o2hql815l8sqp8m05lu2kqc5phc68k@
4ax.com:

All fair enough. And most of the former part of the above is why
"evolution" cannot be "taught," only "taught about" without moving from
hypothesizing to hypostatizing. And how do you reconcile the above,
acknowledging the variety and the fact that the hypotheses are not
absolutely "testable and demonstrable," with your pervious statement
regarding "untestable hypothesis" being crap.


http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/sciproof.html

Microevolution is quite often tested and easily demonstrated. We can, in
fact, easily synthesize evolution, and this happens all the time. Let's
say I want E.coli to produce a certain protein. I can use genetic
engineering techniques to splice the production of this protein into the
bacteria, and make a colony that expresses this protein. Now, let's say
I don't really understand this protein so good, but I do know that I want
to change it in some testable way, like I would like the protein to work
at a higher temperature than normal. Well, I could take the DNA from the
little guys, and I could replicate it in a fashion guaranteed to
introduce lots of fairly random errors in the copies. I'd whip up a
bunch of these dirty copies, put them in some bacteria, and test the
resulting proteins, if the production managed to survive. Then, I'd
artificially introduce "survival" by making error-filled copies of that
DNA that produced a protein that worked at a higher temp. I'd just keep
doing this till I got what I wanted. This sort of artificial evolution
is going on every day now.

The jump to natural macroevolution is a tad tougher, and this is why it
is still a theory, and not a fact. However, it is a pretty strong
theory. It falls within our current model. We have seen proteins, we
have seen DNA, we have seen many the molecular events that are associated
with sexual and asexual reproduction. We have seen mutation, and we have
seen mutations passed on. All of this, and more, supports the theory of
evolution. From the web page I point you to, "As Stephen J. Gould has
said, a scientific fact is not 'absolute certainty', but simply a theory
that has been 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to
withhold provisional consent'".

We have not, however, seen the finger of God come down and instill our
corporeal asses with pneumae. This calls for something that lives well
outside our physical explanation of what is, our model, our Kuhnian
paradigm, if you will. To have intelligent design make sense, first we
have to assume that given a primordial ooze, energy, billions of years of
random events, and that "survival of the fittest" deal that Darwin was
so fond of, evolution on its own (or some of its incarnations, such as
saltatory evolution) is not sufficient to produce that which already is.
Then, we have to incorporate some godhead, which lies entirely out of our
best concepts of the physical world, and invoke a miracle. We'd have to
throw out just about every vestige of Descarte's concept of methological
skepticism, upon which most, if not all, of our knowledge has been based
for centuries.

The last few sentences are what make intelligent design fall squarely
into the religion column. I do not pay science teachers to teach
religion.

--
Scott
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