mormonsandscience

Two things:

First, the theories of common descent and mutability of species are two of the most well confirmed theories to have ever been put to potentially falsifying scrutiny. The idea that these ideas will be completely overthrown is truly ludicrous.

Second, while the church might not have spoken out in favor (or opposition!) of many scientific issues (although ether and animal magnetism were endorsed from the general conference pulpit), they certainly have endorsed a few social issues; issues which they were eventually "shown" to be wrong about. i.e. racism, polygamy, sexism, church/state relations, slavery, etc. The church then proceeded to change in favor of what everyone else believed. The question is, why should we hold the Catholic accommodation of scientific issues against them and at the same time give the Mormons a free pass in their accommodation of social issues?

Jeff,

You said: "theories of common descent and mutability of species are two of the most well confirmed theories to have ever been put to potentially falsifying scrutiny".

My goodness, Jeff! You don't realize how wrong you are to assert that common descent is one of the most proven scientific theories. On the contrary, IT HAS NEVER BEEN PROVEN! (sorry for shouting). If you can show me where one life form has evolved in the laboratory into another life form I will start a petition to nominate you to receive a nobel prize in biology.

On the other hand, you are right that evolution resulting from mutations within a species is a fact. Mind you, in my post the focus was more about the Catholic Church accepting evolution as an indisputable sole source of variation in the world.

I agree with you on the issue of the LDS Church taking sides in social issues, although I would not say it was wrong on polygamy, because the law was given by the Savior. As you probably know, the church had to give it up because it contradicted the laws of the land.

Don't be absurd. Just like all science that hadn't been figured out over 4,000 years ago, we must rely on indirect observation in order to confirm (not prove, mind you) any scientific hypothesis. With that in mind, the mutability and common heritage of species has been very, very, very well confirmed. I offer the following list evidences:

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

If one could find a single other scientific hypothesis that finds evidence from half as broad a spectrum of fields, I would be mighty impressed.

One other thing worth mentioning in this debate. If we are going to be honest, we don't care if all living things are really related to each other. Rather, we only care if humans are related to non-humans. So saying that scientists haven't shown that ALL species are descended from each other is somewhat disingenuous. Furthermore, the evidence for human descent the about as strong as one could ever hope for it to be.

No, gravity and relativity have not been "proven", if only for the two reasons which always plague all of science: the inexhaustibility of the ever present ceteris paribus claus, and the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. These problems are the very embodiment of inductive reasoning and its shortcomings, and the physical sciences are just as prey to them as the life sciences are.

True, they have been confirmed in very surprising ways, and the more surprising the confirmation, the stronger it is. But then, so has the Neo-Darwinian synthesis.

I would argue, however, that not only has the Neo-Darwinian synthesis been confirmed in just as surprising of ways, but by a far greater spectrum of sources than Einsteinian physics has.

It is no stretch of the imagination at all to call Darwin the Newton of the life sciences. Indeed, we might call Darwin's achievement a bit greater than that of Newton if only due to the rather chaotic nature of data with which he had to work.

All evidence in science is inductive. All of it without exception. The hypothetico-deductive method is a method whereby you deduce a particular result from a set of posited initial conditions. However, it is impossible to ever actually list all of the initial conditions, so we simply list those we think are relevant. However, what evidence could we ever have that we knew ALL of the relevant initial conditions? This is the problem with both biology and physics share together.

That's why you can never say that you know a scientific model is true, only that it works. This is true to relativity and natural selection. The precision in physics certainly surpasses that of biology, but that doesn't make it any more or less "truer". To restate, the precision of those experiments which confirm gravity and relativity do NOT mean that we should have more confidence in the truth of them than we should in natural selection.

What lends credibility to models and theories is not precision, for the biological realm is not a world which lends itself to micrometer precision. What lends credibility to theories is how unexpected their confirmed results would be is the theory were not true. The fact that we would observe light bending and time dilation WITHOUT relativity would be flat out shocking. That is why it is such strong evidence. But it is still not deductive proof. Similarly, the fact that we observe those 29+ phenomena that I linked to WITHOUT Neo-Darwinian evolution would be flat out astounding. Consider the case of the discovery of Tiktaalik: scientists knew what to look for and where, and lo and behold they actually found it in Greenland. I'm sorry, but that is absolutely astounding and as such counts as VERY strong evidence in favor of evolution. On such a large scale and in such a chaotic "lab" you could never in a million years hope for a better case of the hypothetico-deductive method at work.

Jeff,

Yes, all scientific evidence is ultimately inductive - even hypothetico-deductive results are inductive evidence for the theory; in other words, they are not deductive evidence in the sense of providing the absolute truth of theories.

I am talking more of degrees of certainty or establishing the verisimilitde (truthlikeness) of our theories. This is why I surrounded *certainty* with an asterix in previous posts. I attribute a far greater degree of verisimilitude to theories corroborated with hypothetico-deductive evidence than what I call inductive-type evidence.

Nevertheless, I acknowledge that you have presented legitimate and compelling arguments for the other side, and so I have thoroughly enjoyed this exchange.

Cheers!

I guess I just don't see why all those evidences listed in the 29+ link don't count as "hypothetico-dedective" in nature. While there is certainly a difference in degree on many counts, I don't see it as a difference in kind at all.