Kansas dumps Darwin AND conceptual issues

[Thomas Schlemmermeyer]

Dear Internauts,

The purpose of this message is two-fold:

1.) Unfortunately, I lost one message from yesterday where the writer alluded
to a refutation of evolution from Alabama. Could the link please be reposted?

2.) I would like to mention a few things about conceptual issues which have not
been clarified very well so far. Those who are interested in obtain a nice and
easily readable picture of the conceptual structure of biology are recommended
to read the book "This is biology" by Ernst Mayr.

Those who want to continue to be informed via e-mail reviews and personal notes
like this are told herewith:

In science one distinguishes between a

   a.)hypothetico-deductive verificationist approach
   b.)hypothetico-deductive falsificationist approach
   c.)received view approach
   d.)semantic approach

 The approaches a.) and b.) belong to sciences with universal laws and without
single events (physics).

 The approach c.) belongs to sciences with universal laws and historical single
events (chemistry).

The approach d.) is typical for sciences without strong universal laws and with
a strong emphasis on the search for explanations of single events (Natural
History).

Creationists, according to my experience, usually crash with the approach d.)
as the only semantic context that counts for them is the Bible.

Much money, wasted efforts and so on could be saved, in my humble opinion, if
biologists aligned more to approach d.), confessing that their science has a
rather narrative nature and not so much a hypothetico-deductive one.

Also, in this context, one should not forget that evolutionists normally don't
make many prediction, as predictions refer to the future, but evolution deals
with the past (Natural History). A proper, more adequate term would be that
they look for explanations.

It is, for example, completely absurd, if a peer denies a grant in Natural
History due to the lack of hypotheses (as once unluckily happened with a
proposal of mine).
If the deny should be necessary for whatever motiv, the peer should be kind and
correct enough to deny it due to the lack of possible explanations, staying
thus more aligned to the conceptual structure of his own field.

  Cheers, and sorry for eventual errors in English   Thomas