The Ghost of Paley
Posts: 1703
Joined: Oct. 2005
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jeannot said:
| Quote | What IDers must understand is that evolutionary biology doesn't make future predictions (except at a short timescale). First, they would be useless since they cannot be verified within a researcher's lifetime. Second, as J. G. said, there is far more than one evolutionary path for a given lineage. Third, we cannot predict future selective pressures (environments).
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Correct. Evolution makes retrodictions rather than predictions. But scientists need predictions in order to produce new technologies and carve out promising paths for future research. That's why evos must wait for discoveries in other fields before pursuing their own inquiries. Look how dependent modern evo "science" is on genome sequencing and developments in computer science; conversely, these disciplines have little use for evolution. Why? Because people would rather learn new things than explain old ones.
Which brings me to another observation: the clever way in which everyone (including creationists) constucts cofferdams (in evos's case, caissons  ) to protect his philosophy from encroaching dissonance. Let's use a neutral example: I'm a big fan a baseball and its statistics. While a player's contribution with the bat can be reliably tabulated, his glovework is tougher to measure. A statistician can record assists and putouts, but do these numbers reflect a player's skill or the quirks of the team's pitching staff? And what role does his homepark's dimensions play? The manager's mindset? This problem has bedeviled everyone in the game.
Perhaps one can account for these factors by adding the total number of a fielder's plays, estimating the impact his team makes on these numbers (do the pitchers yield an unusually high number of ground balls? Is the outfield a bit undersized? Are the surrounding players unusually immobile, forcing the player to accept more chances?), and adjust accordingly. But one problem remains: a team is alloted a maximum of 27 outs. This constrains each player by "capping" his number of opportunities. An exceptional defensive player (Ozzie Smith or Andruw Jones in his prime) will reduce the number of hits while "hogging" more than his share of outs. Which means fewer opportunities for everyone else.
This problem is known to just about every statistician in the game. Unfortunately, until the advent of play-by-play data, the stats guy was unable to measure the impact of this factor. So did they admit that the traditional stats were crucially flawed and wait for better metrics? If you answered "Yes", then obviously you haven't been on planet Earth for very long. Instead, they simply ignored the gaping hole in their model, or assumed that it wasn't very important. For example, Bill James wrote an essay a couple of decades ago defending the range metrics current at the time while deriding his critics as "amateur sabermetricians". Recently, however, he came out with Win Shares, a metric that avoids the age-old problem to a much greater extent. His shiny model competes with other metrics such as Ultimate Zone Rating and Defensive Regression Analysis, which account for the precise location of every batted ball over the entire season. While flawed, each method represents a tremendous improvement over traditional statistics, and blessed with these shiny toys, the math crowd regales us with the intractable problems faced by measures of old.
Am I implying any dishonesty here? No, it's just people being people. Humans have a need to solve problems, to make a splash, to create, and they aren't going to let inadequate methods-let alone facts- get in the way. To work, however, this process must be unconscious. There must be no acknowledgement of the incompatability of past positions, because that might compromise today's glosses. Too few transitions in the fossil record? Well, kids, geology predicts that fossilization will be rare, so evolution predicts this state of affairs. And what with soil acidity, depositional bias, continental drift...it's no surprise, and only a rube would think that intermediates would be anything other than vanishingly rare....we can even calculate this....oh look at this new discovery! OOH- and lookie here! and here! See, just as we predicted - an intermediate - no, a whole slew of them! What was it you creos were saying about the poor fossil record? And we can measure the probability of fossil preservation with much more confidence - so there! Once again, the snake sheds his skin without a moment's thought - be he evo, creo, or somewhere in the middle. So what to do? I don't know either, but I do know this: when an expert says a problem doesn't count, it just might be that it can't be counted. Look around you, you'll see this phenomenon everywhere.
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Dey can't 'andle my riddim.
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) changing the enemy's identity in midsentence, except the crowd doesn't rip up the obsolete banners and placards. If anyone does object, they're labeled a crank, rube, and whatever other terms come to mind. This label has some merit, as it usually does take an outsider to probe beneath the surface.
