More thoughts on evolutionary theory

The hypothesis of Evolutionary theory is itself a tautology, it is a statement of simple Mathematical truth: Given anything that can reproduce itself, those who is more fitted for reproduction would have more ‘children’ then those who is less fitted. How can we tell the nature of reproductive fitness? We often do so by looking at the result of reproductive fitness itself, that certainly sound like a circular argument itself. The inherent difficulty of theory of evolution as a science is similar to History: Because we can’t do any historical experiment, and the question of external validity remain a headache for theory of evolution. It is difficult to exactly reproduce the historical condition when evolution happen, nor an experiment can be used to predict what has happened in the past.
Because evolution process had already happen, we simply can’t re-run the history to see what would happen otherwise, what we can do is to suggest the pathway which it may follow. However, there is always more than one pathway to arrive at the current result, therefore even if we manage to disprove one pathway doesn’t mean there is no way to get from here to there except by supernatural means. It is analogue to the idea of naturalism would can never disprove: How can anything beyond nature happened within the realm of nature? How to draw up an hypothesis or experiment that can give definite test to the theory of evolution itself? In what way we can disprove the process of evolution? In what way we can disprove tautology?

Is evolutionary theory a better ‘explanation’?

There is a growing debate between the Creationism and Evolutionary Theory in USA as raised by Christian Right, and, of course it argue that the former is a better explanation than later, while scientist argue otherwise. Although this is the topic of my thesis paper when I was studying in a Christian College, I am not going to dwell into this issue here. There are good discussion of it on the Internet. My point here is to play Devil’s Advocate on the common sense that evolutionary theory in Biology is a better explanation.

What people often missed in the debate is what is qualified as an explanation? I would like argue for the point that although Creationism is not consider as an explanation since it replace one unknown with another, there are some issues associated with calling evolutionary theory an ‘explanation’.

Evolutionary Theory belong to realm of science, what essentially it gave is the how of the process of evolution but not the why. Some has considered that science is not suited to answer this set of questions. Although once we know the process, we can extend the theory to test its external validity(see if it can made accurate prediction), or even applied that to application in daily life (genetics); but can process be consider as ‘explanation’? Does knowing how we breath ‘explain’ what is breathing? Does knowing how our mind works means we can understand what our mind is? What I believe is that evolutionary theory is only the first layer of onion, the process of peeling the onion could go on indefinitely as we want it. Suppose we get the Physicist’s holy grail: ‘Theory of Everything’. Does it means not that we can further ask: Why is Theory of Everything is one way but not the another? Can we dig further into TOE and understand how is what it is? Therefore I could sympathy with religionists stop the investigation in the very first step, they may just know that they can’t finish peeling the onion, and they want to save time to do something else.

Evolutionary theory, in my opinion, by its nature is not really about explanation but predicting what is going to happen next, because what it said essentially is: Now is because of what is happened in the past led to this now but not the other now, follow logics from Mathematics and Statistics; plus some accidents.’ Thus Evolutionary theory, like history, suffer the same problem as it belong to ‘retrospective’ science. We can’t verify how history develop since we can’t test one hypothesis against another in the sense that the past is gone. How could we know what happen if ‘Martin Luther King is not murdered?’, or ‘Al Gore instead of George W. Bush is elected in 2004′? Similarly, although we can do experiment to test the hypothesis in the laboratory, but we can never be sure that the parameters in the laboratory is identical to the parameters of the part of evolutionary history we inquire. Therefore, the internal validity of experiments against hypothesis in evolutionary theory can never be completely ascertained (unless we have a time traveling machine to collect the sample from the past). And we also must not ignore that evolutionary process is full of accidents, since we don’t know exactly how those accidents happen, therefore the ‘explanation’ afforded by evolution theory can never be completed. It is not the fault of this theory itself, but because of the nature of object we inquire about. But it never rules out that there maybe better methods and framework (other than the scientific method) to understand the phenomenas of what evolution theory talked about.

Thus my conclusion is ‘Evolutionary theory’ is the better one at least because it could be argue against, and we can use this framework to build more powerful explanation; as compare to Creationism which can never be objectively falsify. Notice there is a philosophical bias toward intellectualism: Those which allow we to think and argue must be better than those doesn’t allow to think. Why must this be right?

轉載:再為李怡先生辯護

(轉載自:http://euler.truthbible.net/index.php?entry=entry080518-204424)
真的為李怡先生不值,他說的是東,別人罵的是西,中國共產黨的確因為不畏天所以做出很多傷害人民的事,如三反五反、文化大革命、大躍進以致後來的大飢荒等。
三反五反、文化大革命乃是中共狂妄,以為人性/心理可以用政治運動改造,人性是依自然(天)來運行的,中共不是不知道,只是以為可以勝過人性;
大躍進乃是中共狂妄,以為經濟/物理定律可以用政治運動改造,經濟/物理定律亦是依自然(天)來運行的,中共不是不知道,只是以為可以勝過經濟/物理學;
大 飢荒乃是中共累積以上種種失誤,以政治去代替經濟的惡果,亦是自然的結果,天在中國文化中,既是道德,亦是物理及心理,是不可以冒犯的。冒犯天等不單向道 德宣戰,亦是同時向物理及心理自然定律宣戰,有可能鬥得贏麼?你可以令蘋果逗留在空中而不用燃料麼?不畏天其實是向自然主義宣戰,人即是向自己宣戰,人本 來亦是自然的一部份,有勝算嗎?
中共不畏天,以為自己就是天,物理/經濟/心理/社會定律可以因它而改!這是不畏天的可怕!