N.Wells
Posts: 1836 Joined: Oct. 2005
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Quote (ChemiCat @ Feb. 23 2017,02:21) | Quote | Yes, a hypothesis is a conclusion. And before testing it can be oppositely worded to hold true until tested to be false without it's logic structure changing, it's just inverted. In this case that would be by changing "are best explained" to "are not best explained". A working model and theory would still indicate the "are best explained" condition, exact same thing. |
And this shows why what you are doing is not science.
And a reply explaining this;
Quote | A scientific hypothesis is more than just that. It is a proposed explanation that is both testable, and chiefly, FALSIFIABLE. |
And Gaulin doubles down;
Quote | The "theory" for the ID Lab "model" for experimenting with "intelligence" and ultimately "intelligent cause" is what tests the hypothesis that reads "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause" to be true. In this case the hypothesis requires far more than a simple experiment I could perform and write up in a couple of weeks, it's decades of work on a theory that I will never live long enough to fully complete because theories are tentative and in this case some of the biological details could take 100 or more years to fully discover. |
A "theory is tentative"? Really? The only thing tentative is that it can be changed when other facts become available through research. Your grasp of definitions lets you down again. Your understanding of hypothesis and theory is ass-backwards. |
He has partial understanding, but with much confusion.
In science, theories must indeed be considered tentative, because we can never positively prove something - as you noted, we cannot assume that new information will never conflict with our present understanding. Nonetheless, as you know, to become a theory an idea needs to explain a bunch of stuff, needs to pass some tests / get some corroboration / have some supporting evidence, and needs to rise to some level of general acceptance, either as being likely to be true or at least to be sufficiently interesting to warrant working within its framework. (Exceptions: ideas that were theories that have been rejected can still be called theories, like phlogiston theory; theories in math need not be provable or even testable as long as they provide a consistent logical framework, like string theory).
Hypotheses in statistics (and statistical hypotheses in science) are simple declarative statements and their negations or complements: Ho - the mean of set A is significantly greater than the mean of set B; Ha - ....... is not significantly greater. Non-statistical hypotheses in science can be simple assertions, but are more often proposed potential explanations that are testable and which in practice can get a bit tangled and non-exclusive: H1 - Non-avian dinosaurs went extinct due to an asteroid impact on Earth; H1A - H1, impacting in the Yucatan; H2 - They went extinct due to climate change; H3 - They went extinct due to huge outpourings of flood basalts H3A - H3, specifically the Deccan traps H4 - They went extinct due to some or all of the above in combination H5 - They went extinct not for those reasons but due to some other cause. This leads to the idea of hypotheses being "tested in bundles". Statistical hypotheses are directly testable, while more general research hypotheses like my examples about dinosaur extinction lead less directly to predictions that can be used to test them: - If H1, then extinctions should be simultaneous and sudden; we should seen simultaneous spikes in iridium, tektites, and soot; we should see impact debris and related damage, which should increase toward an impact site, etc. - If H2, extinctions should be gradual and should shift across climate zones in directions related to the cause: if cooling, then tropical organisms should be affected first, and polar organisms affected least, etc.
Gary's problems are manifold. His "premise" assumes his desired conclusion, is ill-defined, and never gets tested. If he uses his premise as an hypothesis ("[some features] are best explained ...."), then without further specification the negation ("[some features] are not best explained.....") is neither mutually exclusive nor testable. Also, he never actually tries to test his proposal: he just re-asserts it as a conclusion. His terms (particularly "intelligent", "design", and "intelligent cause") are too ambiguous, too ill-defined, and too misused by him to allow for testing. His attempt at setting up a logical dichotomy fails, because he mischaracterizes the alternative: evolutionary theory is not just natural selection. By "undirected" does he mean without direction or without a director? - evolutionary processes are not exclusively directionless: mutation, recombination, and the vicissitudes of genetic drift including reproductive isolation enforced by nature are directionless and can drive much evolution on their own, but natural selection inherently provides directionality. He relies on lack of definitions, lack of operational definition, conflation of terms; he mistakes assertions for logic and evidence and his assertions and claims do not logically follow from what he discusses; he fails to back up his assertions with evidence; he gets basic facts wrong; and on, and on, and on, as you have often noted.
Basically, his stuff doesn't rise to the level of a theory and none of it is phrased as well developed and testable hypotheses. It's basically just a poorly developed proposition tangled up in word salad.
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