Kansas dumps Darwin AND conceptual issues

[Stuart G. Poss]

Thomas Schlemmermeyer wrote:

> 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.

Perhaps I am in the minority in systematic biology, but I couldn't disagree more
.
It is precisely because evolutionary theory is predictive, as is the phyletic
history that results from the historical course of evolution, that it is importa
nt
to understand and to be able to trace the "true phylogeny".  Unless phylogeny ha
s
a predictive component, it would seem to me to be of little other than
entertainment value.  But this is hardly the case and I don't think most of thos
e
who seek it, believe it has nothing to tell us about the future.

Admittedly, the state of our science is not to a level that the precision of our
predictions is often great, but I think that it has progressed to a point that w
e
can reasonably say in many cases that certain combinations of characteristics ar
e
extremely unlikely (in all probability will never be found to occur in nature, o
r
at least not that resulting from evolutionary history of this is planet).  For
example, one would have a very hard time convincing me I will ever find a
scorpaenoid fish with feathers, the machinations of  19th century nature
philosopher Swainson treatise notwithstanding.

Clearly, we need much more precise knowledge about what particular nuclear DNA
sequences scorpaenid fishes have and what specific genes are responsible (encode
)
for feathers.  However, I PREDICT that when these precise "feather-making" genes
are discovered and their structure convincingly determined, they will be found
entirely lacking in scorpaenid fishes, or at the least, they will be structured
and function quite differently in scorpaenids than they do in birds.  This is a
perfectly falsifiable prediction, whose answer is presently unknown, and I would
indeed be surprised if anyone proves this proposition (prediction) false, thereb
y
accepting Swainson's ideas over my own.   However, I would certainly encourage a
ll
who disregard the truth of this proposition to bring forth evidence to the
contrary.

Admittedly, there are other similar predictions one could make about the
characteristics of scorpaenoid fishes that could made that would be more
immediately helpful to understanding less well known attributes of their
evolutionary history.  Also, admittedly some of these would be predictions that
at
our present state of knowledge, should make us less confident in the "truth of
their assertion."  Nonetheless,  assessing the composition of features of
organisms that occur or fail to occur in combination and the detailed
understanding of the structure and function of these featues lend themselves wel
l
to making predictions for which the gathering of evidence to refute a given
proposition (prediction) is possible, at least in principle, assuming one is
precise enough in their predictions and methodologies to be able to recognize
different outcomes of such "comparative" experiments.

Might there exist a evolutionary equivalent of Heisenberg uncertainty principle,
in which the exact base-pair sequence of all life that ever existed might never
be
fully known?  I would suspect so, however, this does not imply that the major
cladogenic and anagenic events can not be known with a high degree of certainty.
The existence and broad acceptance of such a principle has not led to the collap
se
of hypothesis testing in the theoretical physics community.  Why would we expect
this to occur in biology, where the phenomena we study are no less directly
observable than subatomic particles?

I guess I would ask, why should we be interested in narrative "explanations" and
story-telling, when understanding important "evolutionary milestones in life on
earth" would be far more predictive and hence useful?

It might be suggested that those who can not make predictions, don't provide muc
h
evidence of knowledge of their subject, despite protestations to the contrary.
I
didn't review your proposal, but it is not unreasonble for one to ask the questi
on
of any study, "What will this tell us?"  Without a prediction of any kind to be
either refuted or not, how would we decide if we've learned  anything?   Just
advance another story (ad hoc explanation?) and enjoy the fun of trading stories
?
It is for this reason I am struggling with the notion of orthogenesis, but I wil
l
have more to say about that topic later.

> 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).

--
_____________________________________________________________________
Stuart G. Poss                       E-mail: Stuart.Poss at usm.edu
Senior Research Scientist & Curator  Tel: (228)872-4238
Gulf Coast Research Laboratory       FAX: (228)872-4204
P.O. Box 7000
Ocean Springs, MS  39566-7000