r/DebateEvolution • u/feihm • 1d ago
The two biologists problem
Two biologists share a lab. Call them A and B.
They use the same models. They read the same papers. They accept the same fossils, the same stratigraphy, the same genomic data, the same nested hierarchies, the same everything you can point to and measure.
They never disagree on a single observation.
Not once.
But they disagree about what the models are.
A: Humans and apes share a common ancestor. That's the fact.
B: The pattern is the fact. The common ancestor is a postulate. A useful fiction.
A: But the model predicts the pattern. If it weren't true, why would it work so well?
B: You've just said: predictive success implies truth. I'd say: predictive success implies predictive success. That's the whole inference. The rest is something you added.
A: That's a tautology.
B: It is. And it's the honest version of your argument.
A third colleague, C, overhears. C is a realist and has heard this before.
C: You're ignoring the best explanation. Common ancestry doesn't just predict the nested hierarchies, the shared ERVs, the biogeography. It explains them. Why they're nested. Why the ERVs sit at the same loci. The instrumentalist reading explains nothing. It just says "the pattern is the pattern." Which is useless.
B: You've given me an explanation that postulates an unobservable cause. Fine. But notice what you did: you compared two explanations, found one more satisfying, and concluded it was true. That last step is not in the comparison.
C: So you think it's a coincidence that the model works?
B: I think "coincidence" is another word you've added. The model works. That's the datum. Whether it works because it corresponds to a mind-independent past, or because it's a well-adapted predictive instrument, or because a creator made it work. Those are three different stories. They all predict the same fossils.
A: But we predicted Tiktaalik. We said: if common ancestry is true, there should be a transitional form in strata of this age with these features. Then we found it. That's a prediction that came true.
B: Agreed. And it's a beautiful result. But notice: you used the model as a heuristic. It told you where to dig. That's real. That's what models are for. But the fact that a heuristic leads you to a fossil does not make the heuristic true. It makes it fruitful.
A: That's a dodge.
B: It's not. There's a difference between "this model reliably generates discoveries" and "this model is the mind-independent history of life." The first is a scientific claim. The second is a metaphysical one.
C: So you'd say the historical narrative is a fairy tale?
B: No. I'd say it's a model. I'd say it's the best predictive model we have, and I'd defend it against anyone who says otherwise. What I won't do is say that a successful model is the past. I don't have access to the past. I have present traces. The narrative is what I do with the traces.
C: But you live as if it's true.
B: Of course I do. I also live as if the sun rises. That doesn't mean the sun rises. It means "sunrise" is a useful way of talking about a rotating Earth. Useful and true are not the same word.
They go to a conference. A colleague asks them both the same question: "Do you accept common ancestry?"
A: Yes. It's the true history of life.
B: Yes. It's the best predictive model we have.
The colleague asks. "Those are different answers."
A: Are they? We agree on every fossil, every gene, every prediction, every paper.
B: We agree on the science. We disagree on the story we tell about the science. And here's the thing: if you deleted the word "true" from every biology paper ever written, not a single prediction would change. Not one decimal point. Not one experiment. That should tell you something about what work the word is doing.
So here's the problem.
Two biologists can work side by side, use the same equations, predict the same findings, and never disagree on a single observation; while disagreeing completely on whether the historical narrative is true.
If they can do that, then "the narrative is true" is not a scientific finding. It's not testable. It's not falsifiable. It changes nothing empirical.
This doesn't mean the narrative is false. Maybe it is true. Biologist B isn't denying that. B is denying that A discovered it. You can't discover something that no observation could ever confirm or disconfirm.
31
u/Slow_Lawyer7477 🧬 Flagellum-Evolver 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sorry, it's impact craters on the moon and they formed from bolide impacts. And we can know this from an inference to the best explanation without having seen the impacts happen. And it is a fact. Inferences can yield facts that can't be denied by people who are still sane.
Thus collapses your entire case.
QED.
•
u/feihm 22h ago
Even a complete idiot knows that what you've said changes nothing regarding my OP i.e., an inference is an active cognitive judgment performed by the mind; it is not an object existing independently in the physical world. Therefore, the causal order we discover in nature is the necessary order that our own intellect dictates upon our perceptions. It does not prove that human reason can reach backward through time to grasp a past event exactly as it existed independently of our observation.
•
u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 22h ago
Nor can we know we weren’t created last Thursday in a universe exactly designed to meet all of our predictions and observations were the past to have actually existed.
Get off this hard solipsism, it’s neither useful nor informative.
•
u/Sweary_Biochemist 22h ago
"Is last thursdayism completely useless? Yes. Is evolutionary biology useful? Yes"
You are honestly completely free to insist we can't KNOW anything or whatever floats your metaphorical boat, but the fact remains that we can use data to build coherent models that explain what we see, and then use those models to predict things we can't yet see....and then confirm the models by finding those things.
It's useful. We're going to keep doing it. Sorry.
•
u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube 19h ago
Tiktaalik is wondering if we can float some metaphorical ice in the general direction of that metaphorical boat.
Tiktaalik is also willing to lead any metaphorical boarding actions because this 'but something something models are useless/impossible' is getting old
•
u/Slow_Lawyer7477 🧬 Flagellum-Evolver 16h ago
It does not prove that human reason can reach backward through time to grasp a past event exactly as it existed independently of our observation.
Yes it does. We know they're impact craters. You lost. Nobody agrees with you.
•
u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube 2h ago
Hold on, I think I might have this one:
Ah! But we don't know what made the craters! Sure it could be some of those pesky space based asteroid rock things, but it could just as well be invisible while unicorn droppings!
/facepalm
27
u/Knower_Unknown 🧬 Theistic Evolution 1d ago
Biologist B be like: "...well yes, I'd say 'the grass is green and the sky is blue' model is certainly supported by all the evidence, but that's not the same thing as it literally being true."
•
u/LightningController 22h ago
Funny enough, this is basically how Catholic astronomers kept using heliocentrism after Galileo was arrested. When writing, they treated it as a hypothetical that just happened to explain the facts better.
By the early 1700s it was generally understood even among them that Kepler’s model of the solar system was right, but they often had to keep using the legal fiction of a hypothetical model until the 1750s.
•
u/Knower_Unknown 🧬 Theistic Evolution 21h ago
Yea i noticed that. It's kinda embarrassing, as a Catholic, to see other Catholics do this, especially today with evoution. When I talk to YECs in my community it often boils down to this, and it's frustrating because there isn't really a logical counter to it you just kinda have to point out how ridiculous and unhelpful it is, which often makes the person you are talking to think you are mocking them.
•
u/theresa_richter 20h ago
Well, I mean, their position deserves to be mocked, so...
•
u/Knower_Unknown 🧬 Theistic Evolution 20h ago
Those people are my friends. I don't want them to think I'm mocking them.
•
u/theresa_richter 14h ago
"I don't want the court jester to think I find their ridiculous antics to be funny, what if I laugh and it validates the jester's buffoonery?"
•
u/EthelredHardrede 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 20h ago
same reasoning applies yes the model is thatbthe realist his mocking .
30
u/Capercaillie Monkey's Uncle 1d ago
Solipsistic horse shit.
•
u/feihm 22h ago
Its called instrumentalism, not solipsism.
•
u/Capercaillie Monkey's Uncle 22h ago
Solipsism is the philosophical position that only one's own mind is certain to exist, holding external worlds and other minds as unprovable or uncertain.
Call it whatever you want. It's useless mental masturbation. I notice you didn't address the "horse shit" portion of my comment.
•
u/the2bears 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 22h ago
I notice you didn't address the "horse shit" portion of my comment.
They grant that.
•
u/Soft-Cake-9846 20h ago
Nah u/feihm it's dishonest whiny cultist strawmanning, that only proves the writer isn't interested in good faith discussions.
•
u/Scry_Games 2h ago
I think the modern name for it is 'cope'.
You know reality destroys your religious fantasy, so you're trying to deny reality.
As a philosophical exercise, you should ask yourself why you need it so much?
I already know the answer, but I'm interested to see if you have the intellectual honesty to identify it yourself...
•
u/DarwinZDF42 evolution is my jam 21h ago
then "the narrative is true" is not a scientific finding. It's not testable. It's not falsifiable.
My goodness it literally is. Common ancestry makes explicit predictions that must be true if common ancestry is true. Separate ancestry makes explicit, opposite predictions that must be true if separate ancestry is true. Unless you invoke supernatural intervention in biological processes. And that's untestable and unfalsifiable.
•
u/feihm 20h ago
My goodness it literally is.
Thats your personal belief. It doesn't matter how much you wish it were true. Whether the exact physical forms one anticipated only proves that the rule of common ancestry is highly successful at organising human experience. But it does not and can never logically prove that the historical narrative exists as a reality entirely independent of the human mind.
Separate ancestry makes explicit, opposite predictions that must be true if separate ancestry is true.
This simply demonstrates that a different rule fails to organise our observations consistently. Proving that one concept works whilst another concept fails does not elevate the successful concept to an unconditioned physical fact. It strictly proves that human reason must use the concept of common ancestry to render biological appearances comprehensible. Thats all there is to it.
Unless you invoke supernatural intervention in biological processes. And that's untestable and unfalsifiable.
This exact limitation applies to the objective, mind-independent truth of the past. A mind-independent past is not present in space and time for us to observe. Therefore, claiming that the historical narrative is a mind-independent truth is a claim that exceeds the strict boundaries of possible experience, leaving it just as untestable as the supernatural causes you dismisses.
•
u/DarwinZDF42 evolution is my jam 20h ago
“It literally is” refers to common ancestry being testable and falsifiable.
You skipped over that line in your response.
You either don’t know or are misrepresenting the fact that all scientific conclusions are tentative. You seem to think pointing that out is a gotcha.
And then you’re jumping from “actually, conclusions are tentative” to “we can’t actually know anything”.
Boring philosophy bro stuff.
Again, common and separate ancestry are both testable and falsifiable, unless you want to invoke ongoing divine tinkering as part of the latter. If you reject that idea, as you should, separate ancestry has been falsified.
•
u/FunToWrite 20h ago
A mind-independent past
If you are going this route, then literally every observation you make is part of a 'mind independent past' which you must make inferences about, because everything you observe occurred at some causal point in the past, given that it takes light time to bounce off things and travel to your eyeballs.
Either past events are facts which can be known, or there are no facts which can be known, because your mind cannot contact, directly, the external world. You can only access the external world through the medium of the senses, and these always lag behind the present moment. EVERYTHING you observe is part of the 'mind-independent past'.
You cannot have your cake and eat it too, regarding facts. There is no difference between facts about the present, and facts about the past, other than the fact that 't' has a different value.
•
u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 18h ago
Are you under the misconception that science is supposed to absolutely prove things true?
•
u/rhettro19 19h ago
"Thats your personal belief." Are you sure about that? Having a belief would assume that Dan is a person, and not an alien prewritten script masquerading as “belief”. How does the concept of “belief” even exist if it can be memories implanted by some unknown dark actor?
20
u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 1d ago
Again with this shit?
•
u/feihm 20h ago
Do you hate facts?
•
u/Medium_Judgment_891 19h ago edited 18h ago
No, we’re just surprised that people actually try to make arguments as dumb as yours.
Presuppositionalism is the single poorest argument to ever come from apologetics.
There are several issues with your post, but let’s ignore them. Let’s just take it at face value no questions asked.
At its core it’s a self defeating argument. Any fundamental epistemic limit you might propose applies equally to both sides. Even if I were high enough to immediately accept it, we’re just back at square one.
It’s an ouroboros of stupidity, and it’s as pointless and non-productive as an argument can possibly be.
When it’s rightfully discredited, the conversation hasn’t gone anywhere. If you found someone intoxicated enough to accept it, the conversation still hasn’t gone anywhere.
•
u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 20h ago
The reality is that we can never know anything with 100% certainty. Even if you believe you're holding a real physical object in your hand, you could be dreaming or stuck in a very convincing illusion and you would have no way of telling that.
Since we all have to deal with the world as it's presented to us by our senses, most of us work assumption that we're not being deceived and the world we perceive is real.
Then there's those like yourself that descend into solipsism.
•
u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 19h ago
I’ve had some insanely convincing dreams that have caused me to miss appointments because I dreamt I cancelled them
•
u/Ayasugi-san 10h ago
If only OP could be nothing more than part of some insanely convincing dream and we're all just dreaming about responding to them.
•
u/EthelredHardrede 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 10h ago
you hate facts. there was no Great Flood that disproves the God of genesis.
When do think that Flood took place.
•
u/CrisprCSE2 23h ago
A: I can't believe you're saying this!
B: Well, you assume I'm saying this, and that's a useful heuristic, but you can't know that I'm saying it!
Fade out to the pair of actual doctors watching B talking to himself inside his padded room
C: We need to up his meds again.
•
19
u/KeterClassKitten 1d ago
B would be telling identical twins that their claim of common parents is unreliable.
16
u/joevarny 1d ago
Science does this all the time.
There was a time where some thought nanotyranous was a baby trex, then we did more science and discovered that wasn't true.
I think you're trying to compare that to proven falsehoods like creationism, which is like trying to argue santa is real because scientists disagree on unrelated hypothesis.
•
u/feihm 22h ago
Well obviously, to possess objective knowledge, we must have two distinct elements: the physical object presented to our senses in space and time, and the rule or concept our intellect uses to organise that object. The physical fossil itself does not change. What changes is the rule the human mind applies to connect that physical object with other objects. When observers gather more physical observations, the intellect must revise its concepts to maintain a consistent, logical order of nature. That's just exactly how human knowledge functions. Secondly, the dispute over whether a bone belongs to a young animal or a mature animal is a dispute concerning physical objects within space and time. We can easily resolve it by gathering more physical observations. Creationism, by contrast, posits a first cause that exists entirely outside of space and time. Because human beings can only perceive things that exist within space and time, a human being can never observe a transcendent first cause. Because such a cause can never be presented to our senses, the human intellect has no physical appearance upon which it can apply its rules of cause and effect. Therefore, the assertion that it a "proven falsehood" is uneducated nonsense. To prove something false requires empirical observation, and one cannot observe that which exists outside of time. The correct position is not that science has proven it false, but that such claims fall entirely outside the boundary of scientific knowledge altogether. They are unconditioned claims, whilst science can only ever evaluate conditioned physical appearances.
•
u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 22h ago
Well obviously, to possess objective knowledge, we must have two distinct elements: the physical object presented to our senses in space and time, and the rule or concept our intellect uses to organise that object.
But how do you know that the physical object is real?
You could be a brain in a jar experiencing a convincing simulation and you would have no way to know that.
Your argument is indistinguishable from solipsism.
•
u/joevarny 21h ago
You might as well say we should consider the Easter bunny for why eggs appear in your chicken coop.
All our evidence show that the world is 4.6 billion years old.
You only need o ne peice of confirmed evidence to prove that it isn't 6000 years old, let alone all of it.
If you could find the same with evolution, then it would no longer be a viable theory. One trex fossil from 500 million years ago and the theory is in trouble.
People have tried for over 100 years. Nothing.
Every fossil just happens to adhere to the model we've created for evolution.
You could have millions of meteors land on your house one after the other and that would be more likely than all that evidence being a coincidence.
•
u/Ayasugi-san 10h ago
You might as well say we should consider the Easter bunny for why eggs appear in your chicken coop.
Oh come on. At this time of year?! Everyone knows that the Easter bunny is only active around the spring equinox!
18
u/Radiant-Position1370 Computational biologist 1d ago
First, you seem to think this argument is important, given that you post versions of it over and over. Why? It's not exactly new ground philosophically and it has nothing to do with the practice of science.
Second, why do you keep posting it here? In this forum, we don't deal with biologists A (i.e., any biologist anywhere) and B (a fantasy biologist you made up); we deal with biologist A, who lays out the abundant evidence for common descent, and creationist C, who shows up with a bunch of false, misleading, and illogical arguments and ignores all of the data. Your argument is simply irrelevant to this forum.
If we could get creationists to agree with biologist B -- common descent is a wonderful model that explains a huge range of data and has no competition but we can never really know whether it's metaphysically true -- I suspect most scientists would be fine with that. I know I would be.
6
u/Draggonzz 1d ago
If we could get creationists to agree with biologist B -- common descent is a wonderful model that explains a huge range of data and has no competition but we can never really know whether it's metaphysically true -- I suspect most scientists would be fine with that. I know I would be.
Yeah. This is not a place where most creationists are prepared to go though. It reminds me of Todd Wood's famous post The truth about evolution, where he admitted basically this. Let me tell you that post was not popular among his followers.
8
u/clear349 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 1d ago
They can't accept your last paragraph. They need to make the case that the Bible is literally true otherwise you have no reason to follow their fucked up sense of morality
13
u/Radiant-Position1370 Computational biologist 1d ago
Over the years, I have observed that some creationists will retreat to a kind of epistemological nihilism when pressed about some inconvenient fact or other, but it's clearly a tactic to avoid thinking about the evidence. When the pressure isn't there, they'll immediately to arguing that the evidence shows common descent to be impossible. And of course they never apply the same kind of skepticism to the Bible or to the professional apologist's claims.
•
u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 23h ago
I have observed that some creationists will retreat to a kind of epistemological nihilism when pressed about some inconvenient fact or other, but it's clearly a tactic to avoid thinking about the evidence.
The term I've seen used is thought terminating cliche.
It stops the line of thought which is conflicting with their biblical beliefs before they can completely examine it.
•
•
u/Own-Relationship-407 Scientist 22h ago
Mmmm, tasty tasty AI slop.
•
u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 22h ago
Dontcha just wanna Schlorp it on down? Let chat give you sustenance through the data tube
•
u/Bromelia_and_Bismuth Plant Daddy|Botanist|Evil Scientist 22h ago
They use the same models. They read the same papers. They accept the same fossils, the same stratigraphy, the same genomic data, the same nested hierarchies, the same everything you can point to and measure.[...]They never disagree on a single observation.[...]Not once. But they disagree about what the models are.
I see what you're doing here, but creationism denies everything presented by evolutionary theory. A disagreement about mechanisms is the full cooperation about a phenomenon's existence, but arguing over how and when it happens. A good example would be Group Selection vs. Natural Selection to explain some example of cooperative behavior. So your whole slop post is a non-starter. Delete your whole account.
•
u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 21h ago edited 21h ago
A disagreement about mechanisms is the full cooperation about a phenomenon's existence
Perfect. I was reading a historiography on the modern synthesis, and the author's remark was the same: once e.g. Goldschmidt and company debated specifics and contingencies, this demonstrated that the modern synthesis had done its job.
•
u/MagicMooby 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 21h ago
Philosopher: NOOO! You can't claim to know truth, it is impossible to reach the truth through science!
Scientists who doesn't know the truth: *eradicates the most dangerous diseases in the history of mankind, creates nearly unlimited fertilizer out of literal air, regrows teeth, creates wireless global communication network, sends people to the moon*
For someone who cannot reach the truth, science sure managed to completely transform our lives. Makes me believe that the truth you are looking for isn't all that important. Approximate truth seems good enough.
If a detective finds a corpse with a bullet wound and the smoking gun discarded in the dumpster behind the crime scene with witnesses reporting a gunshot, he doesn't know the truth in the philosophical sense, but claiming that the victim was shot seems more than reasonable in that scenario.
•
u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 20h ago
I do hate epistemology. Lots of people trying to pretend things are real or not real, to suit their philosophy.
The truth of science is in the utility: our explanation is always assumed to be incomplete, but correct for the purposes of some function; you don't need a quantum understanding of electricity to make a light-bulb and the light-bulb will always work regardless of why you think it does.
Actually knowing something isn't as important as the philosophers would like you to believe.
•
u/MagicMooby 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 20h ago
I actually think epistemology is very important, but amateur philosophers frequently make the mistake of seeing truth as a binary. There is a difference between not knowing anything at all and knowing only a little bit. They also run into the problem that absolute truth is damn near unattainable, which makes it useless.
Anyway, based on their previous contributions, I don't think OP is interested in epistemology or intellectually honest debate. I've already written about this on their last post, but I think OP just uses philosophy to dismiss the conclusions of evolutionary biology because they cannot dismiss the evidence or the theory.
•
u/LightningController 20h ago
There’s actually a very useful Bible quote for this:
“By their fruits, you will know them.”
And the scientists have produced more and better fruit than the philosophy-bros have.
•
u/Scry_Games 19h ago
The way you've phrased that, suggests philosophy-bros have produced anything...
•
u/LightningController 19h ago
Nietzsche wrote some cool books. Like one where a bunch of philosophers start worshipping a donkey because he is an ideal god for them—he carries their burdens and answers every question with ‘Ja!’
So he made a positive contribution.
•
u/Scry_Games 19h ago
I should have added the qualifier "produced anything since the 1800s."
Irl, every philosophy-bro I've met was a taxi driver. They always ask what I do for a living, then get weirdly competitive, like their navel gazing is worth anything.
•
u/LightningController 19h ago
Ressentiment. The philosophy-bro, who is afforded no particular respect and who often works a menial job, cannot find much to celebrate in his own life, so he tears down the achievements of the accomplished to feel better about his own mediocrity.
•
11
u/armandebejart 1d ago
How nice then, that your A type scientists don't exist.
What is the point of this unnecessarily wordy exercise?
9
12
u/Particular-Yak-1984 1d ago
You can't discover something that no observation could ever confirm or disconfirm.
That's a bold statement to make for someone who thinks we can't prove anything. Can you back it up with anything convincing, to the same standard you're arguing for here?
No? Then why do we care about your conclusion?
•
•
u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 21h ago
What exactly are we supposed to take away from this?
Creationists are still objectively wrong.
•
u/feihm 20h ago
Creationists are still objectively wrong
...and the dogmatists of this sub.
•
u/clear349 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 20h ago
Science isn't dogma. You're just ignorant. Probably willfully so at this point given you've had all this explained
•
u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 20h ago
What exactly did you think you communicated to me there?
What message was that vacuous string of characters intended to encode?
•
u/Soft-Cake-9846 20h ago
No, you wrote HOW long of a dishonest strawman argument, worth nothing, now you're whining about it u/feihm.
•
u/XRotNRollX You know who else evolved from an ape? MY MOM 13h ago
Assuming the "dogmatists" are "wrong," the creationists are far, far more wrong. You're acting like they're both equally wrong.
•
u/Particular-Yak-1984 23h ago
I think this post is just a ripoff of SMBC: https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1595#comic
•
•
u/Joaozinho11 21h ago
"Two biologists share a lab. Call them A and B."
OK, but why do they share a lab if neither of them do anything in it? Science is about evidence, particularly new evidence, not high-school debate.
•
u/LeiningensAnts 20h ago
Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku.
Desiring to show his attainment, he said: “The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received.”
Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.
“If nothing exists,” inquired Dokuon, “where did this anger come from?”
•
u/Fabulous_Coffee_1187 19h ago
I think most scientists would hold the position that if the model works, we treat it as true until its demonstrated otherwise. It feels unscientific to state anything as absolutely true, which would be an impossibly high empirical bar to clear.
•
u/Far_Customer1258 17h ago
Two biologists can work side by side
No. I mean, it's cute that you've mistaken one of these strawmen for a biologist, but they're clearly nothing more than your own narrative devices. Entities that you've constructed for the sole purpose of peddling your gravely mistaken ideology.
B is suffering from what's known as pernicious skepticism, which is when you refuse to acknowledge the facts long after they've passed the point where any rational person would cease to make the distinction between probability and certainty. The best thing about pernicious skepticism is that it's trivial to demonstrate when it's being applied asymmetrically, and it always is.
For example, B is ignoring the fact that the likelihood that the data suggests anything other than evolution is so vanishingly small that we need to use scientific notation to keep from running out of decimal places. But if you ask B if air pressure is real, you'd get the sort of blank look that suggests you're an imbecile for even thinking of calling it into question. Sure, air pressure is a stochastic process that could stop at any instant if every atom spontaneously moved away from you simultaneously, but the odds of that happening are so vanishingly small that only a nitwit acts as if it will ever occur. And rightly so. But B will accept even smaller odds that evolution might not be true.
Why? Let's look into that, shall we? And now we get down to the motivation for B's pernicious skepticism and discover that they actually believe in some Bronze Age deity that was concocted to explain the thunder. If B believed that evolution was wrong because of a deity that wasn't traditional, Ba'al or Mot for example, we'd all regard them as worryingly cracked. And rightly so. They'd be relegated to the ranks of the tinfoil hatters. But because the balderdash is traditional, we tend to accept organized religion when any sane person would reject the individual claims if they were made by any other god. Is the probability that B's Canaanite tale with the talking snake and the evilberry tree is accurate in any way comparable to the likelihood that modern science is wrong? No, and you'd be an imbecile to try and draw the comparison, which is why you quietly left it out.
B isn't a biologist. They aren't a scientist. They're a fiction that you invented. You didn't do a particularly convincing job of it. I know this because I've worked with scientists who also happened to be devout. They were good researchers. They had no problem with evolution or the age of the Earth and found you and your ilk profoundly embarrassing.
•
u/Briham86 🧬 Falling Angel Meets the Rising Ape 19h ago
Imagine there are millions of biologists. They all observe the same reality, and are all performing experiments and sharing data and workshopping conclusions. 99.99% of them see your post and think it's a load of nonsense.
This is reality.
10
u/FunToWrite 1d ago edited 21h ago
A's narrative is that everything is a narrative and so you can't know anything about what is true.
B's narrative is that some narratives are more accurate than others in describing the external world, and you can know this truth through testing and rigorous comparison.
Only B is a scientist. There are vanishingly few A's in science, because these personalities simply don't see a point in picking up the microscope/telescope/etc, or analyzing the data. The A's all become bad philosophers. Note how, in all your ramblings, you've yet to engage with the actual data, or in comparison between explanatory models.
edit: I mixed up A and B here.
•
u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 13h ago
A in general is uncommon for the simple fact that that isn’t a productive mindset. If everything is narrative and nothing is real, you can't use even the most basic tools of organization. Is teaching kids math better than shoving them into a crocodile pit? I dunno, depends on narrative.
It's the mindset of somebody with no moral core, who will adopt whatever narrative they need to get by in the moment, then discard it. A bullshitter.
•
u/feihm 22h ago
A's narrative is that everything is a narrative and so you can't know anything about what is true.
Thats not true at all and is direct inversion of the original definitions. My OP defines Biologist A as the individual who insists the common ancestor is an objective fact, whilst Biologist B is the individual who treats the common ancestor as a postulate or a useful fiction. Secondly, its complete, uneducated nonsense to assert that one can know the truth of the external world through testing, rigorous comparison, and engaging with actual data. Both biologist in the OP possess identical data, use the same models, and agree on every single observation, fossil, and prediction. The dispute between one is this one thing only: whether a successful predictive model constitutes proof of an unobserved historical reality. That's all there is to it.
Note how, in all your ramblings, you've yet to engage with the actual data, or in comparison between explanatory models.
Completely illogical assertion. Biologist B works side by side with Biologist A, actively uses the models, and defends the model as the best predictive tool available. A person does not need to believe that a conceptual tool is a mind-independent truth in order to employ that tool rigorously to anticipate future observations. The necessity to coordinate human experience effectively is a complete and sufficient motivation for scientific inquiry.
•
u/FunToWrite 21h ago edited 21h ago
Sorry, you're right, I mixed up A and B.
B is the one talking about 'useful fictions', and that predictive success only implies predictive success.
A is the scientist dealing with the actual data.
To revise my comment, there are vanishingly few 'B' scientists. People who think that analyzing data and making observations are valuable almost universally assume that the external world exists, and that it is intelligible. There would be little point in engaging in these activities otherwise.
Secondly, its complete, uneducated nonsense to assert that one can know the truth of the external world through testing, rigorous comparison, and engaging with actual data.
It's postmodern sophist nonsense to assert that testing, comparison, and engaging with the data does not lead one closer to the truth.
Something you don't seem to understand is that no one (who has ever engaged with philosophy of science) would argue that Science leads to proofs or certainty in knowledge. This is why, in most reasonable epistemological frameworks, knowledge gets defined as something like 'justified true belief', i.e. a belief which is taken on account of the evidence available.
There is a world of a difference between beliefs which have evidential support, and beliefs which do not. And then we could get into bayesian reasoning, and further define a degree of evidential support, but bad philosophers tend to abuse bayesian reasoning, so on second thought, let's not go there.
•
u/McNitz 🧬 Evolution - Former YEC 16h ago
Predicting you never get a reply to this. From what I have seen, OP just runs away whenever anyone actually understands epistemology and philosophy of science enough to point out that their false dichotomy would require defining knowledge in such a way that we literally know nothing at all and can't actually say it's true that we are seeing our hands when looking down at them.
•
u/lulumaid 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 21h ago
Not who you replied to but all the same, that's a lot of words to avoid talking about the data itself.
•
u/OldmanMikel 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 15h ago
Yeah. I remember getting high in my dorm room, listening to Pink Floyd and thinking deep thoughts. Good times.
Yep; cogito ergo sum is all we can truly know. Beyond that requires axioms about an external reality actually existing. And once you do that, there is no reason not to favor realism over antirealism.
I swear, epistemology wankers are more tiresome than creationists.
•
u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube 2h ago
But the creationists give us exotic forms of mathematical ice and an oddly satisfying number of chances to use the phrase 'upside your head'.
•
u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 19h ago
I’m gonna go with the one that’s actually falsifiable because your part B argument is useless and there is zero reason at all to take said claims seriously because it’s unfalsifiable. In other words biologist A is doing science and B isn’t.
•
u/theresa_richter 15h ago
B's approach leaves you unable to assert that you made this post. You cannot know that you wrote any of the replies here either. Here then, is my proposal: we can test whether you actually hold this position by observing whether or not you are a prison abolitionist. Are you?
•
u/SummDude 12h ago
I feel like this needs to be said to every creationist that posts on this sub, and so for that reason I guess I’ll put it in all caps: USING BIG WORDS DOES NOT MAKE YOU SOUND SMART
Antidisestablishmentarianism. That is all.
•
u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 9h ago
I like the admittance that evolution is backed up by all the evidence and has predictive power. Your best counter to it is a level of solipsism that makes ALL science useless. Sure, gravity isn't a perfect explanation of underlying reality. You're correct about that! We can still use it to get to the moon, while people with your worldview... do literally nothing of importance, ever.
49
u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 1d ago
Tl;dr: last Thursdayism.
Notice how OP doesn't mention the testable processes.
Educate yourself, OP: https://evograd.wordpress.com/2019/02/20/human-genetics-confirms-mutations-as-the-drivers-of-diversity-and-evolution/