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Comment by tylerjwilk00 | Hacker News Reader

Here is an intermediate form theory I just came up with as I read your comment.

FALL SURVIVAL THEORY OF WING EVOLUTION

Any tree dwelling creature is at risk of falling and dying. Creatures that can better survive a fall (proto-wings, etc) have an improved chance of propagating this trait to off-spring. Furthermore, if they can better survive a fall they can risk higher climbs. The higher climbs make them better able to avoid predators and hunt prey further increasing selection pressure on fall survival and would dovetail nicely into gliding mutations. From there it is not a far jump to flying [pun intended].

No theory about the deep deep past can ever be certain. We weren't there to watch it happen.

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That just illustrates my point. The ability to come up with THEORIES is not the same thing as validating SCIENTIFIC theories which are falsifiable. Just because it’s easy to come up with a theory off the cuff means there is a lot more work to do in actually explaining how something happened. Phlogiston and Luminiferous Ether were two theories in physics that actually had WAY MORE evidence for them than these, but turned out to be wrong.

What separates a mere theory from a scientifically validated theory is falsifiability and experiment:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

So your solution to difficulty is simply that we should give up trying?

No Thanks.

Theories are a prerequisite to scientific experiment.

That's a bizarre reading of EGreg's comment. If the best theories that we have at present in some domain are weak, then we should acknowledge that. Doing so obviously doesn't prevent people from trying to develop better theories. On the contrary, it should spur them on.

foldr is exactly right. Admitting the truth is major thing in science. The upshot of admitting the truth is that you shouldn't rely on theories that haven't been proven or even tested. You can certainly search for ways to make them falsifiable and try to disprove them. But don't for example make public policy based on them, or publish definite statements about how this theory finally "disproves" competing theories. But again, this applies in any area of science.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman

> or publish definite statements about how this theory finally "disproves" competing theories. But again, this applies in any area of science.

Which competing theory does evolution disprove?

Lamarckism would be one example.

Oh I must have missed that press release. And I'm sure he was talking about lamarckism. Give it a rest.

I think EGreg was talking about specific theories of how particular traits developed, not The Theory of Evolution as a whole.

I was just answering your question.

I think EGreg doubts evolution itself:

"I think the evolution of flight is one of the clearest examples that the standard theories of evolution purely by mutation and natural selection are still lacking explanatory power."

That's doubting the currently accepted explanation for how evolution occurred, not the fact of evolution itself.

The standard response to this sort of doubt inevitably seems to involve a lot of huffing and foot stomping and irrelevant accusations of creationism, as it isn't currently possible to respond with an actually persuasive and non-speculative account of, say, the evolution of feathers via random mutation and natural selection.

He's a creationist. Accept it. Read all his posts in this thread.

I don't care if he's a creationist or not. It's telling that this is your response. You can't actually say anything substantial about how feathers evolved, because you don't know, and neither does anyone else.

FWIW, reading the other responses in this thread does not give me the impression that he's a creationist. If someone asks you why your view is more rational than theism, you should be able to respond to that question without shouting -- and the person asking won't necessarily be a theist. Unfortunately, as EGreg says, it's impossible to say anything at all critical of current evolutionary biology without someone screaming at you that you're a creationist and refusing to engage with any of your points.

At no point did I scream anything. I said I thought he was a creationist, which means believing in the idea of creationism. I also got mildy frustrated in some comments.

Your comment over inflates my reaction.

Do you realize how religious you sound?

Same as an ancap saying “he’s a statist, just accept it, because he says market failures exist”

Oh my bad, so you DON'T believe creationism is a valid alternative to evolution then?

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