I said:
If I may add a specific point to your study, Vajradhara - I'm not sure that the study claimed to measure a rate of spciciation, merely phenotype expression.
After all, we have - as a species - manipulated the basic dog gene pool and created an astonishing array of phenotpye expressions of dogs, marked by their different breeds. Yet at absolutely no stage have we made a breed of dog that was genetically distinct from dog - ie, a new species.
(But don't tell religious fundamentalists that - I just think evolutionary theory horrifically overstates itself, and has some very important mechanisms missing from the theory. Of course, this is one of the ideas I try to address and explain one solution for in my writing (hype, hype!).)
namaste Brian,
have you had a chance to review this article recently?
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
now.. in reference to the stated OP...
evolution is a fact, though perhaps we should define evolution as to faciliate our conversation.
evolution, in its strict biological definition is "a change in allele frequencies over time." this is an observed fact. most folks tend to mean "common descent" when they use the word evolution, which is really just a subset of evolutionary theory.
the fact of the matter remains... we will never be able to prove anything with mathmatical, 100%, certainty in the physical world. we can get pretty close, but not 100%.
in any event... Stephen J. Gould has put this as well as anyone else:
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well evolution
is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
<A id=fact name=fact>Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are
not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.
- Stephen J. Gould, "
Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981
