Feinder
Posts: 6589
Joined: 9/4/2002
From: Land o' Lakes, FL
Status: offline
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Well stated von Murin.
That's exactly right. Neither case can be proven by conventional methods (like we can prove that water boils at 100-deg C).
Ultimately, you had to be there. Since none of us were there, there's no way to prove it. Coupled with the fact that, in the case of evolution, it takes hundreds of thousands of years, the span and subtlety of changes are largely beyond our ability to measure.
A good example however, is that of the interaction of bacteria and penicillin. Given a group of bacteria that has never been exposed to penicillin, and then placed in dish with it. Most of the bacterial colony will die. However, some will survive, and become resistent. The next generation of that same bacteria, if placed in a dish with penicillin, will have a higher percentage surviving.
This is very reason that we have some very powerful/resistant strains of viruses, because of the over-prescription of anti-biotics in the 70s and 80s (when in fact, anti-biotics can do very little to combat a virus, which is different than bacteria).
So what you attempt to do is to study something with a shorter span of gereations (because you can create many repetitions over time), and then expand what you learned to cover a wider range of potential observations.
The method works quite well, except for the fact that, the wider you expand your expections, the more incorrect they become.
We -know- that species evolve. That is a fact. Bacteria become more resistant. Frogs change sex, when there aren't enough of one gender in the pond. Humans are, on average, 3" taller than they were even 100 years ago (altho I'm not sure what good that's doing us).
However, when you say, "How old is the Earth, according to evolution?" You're talking about extrapolating things over time, which happens to be (by your evolution's expectation), about 1.6 billion years old. That's LONG time, which obviously would create a major margin of error because again, the farther away you move from your measurable sample, the greater margin of error.
Or if you follow the theory all the way, "How old is EVERYTHING?!". Now you're talking an estimated 8 - 12 billion years. Now that's a huge margin of error.
So, -that- is why Evolution is indeed a THEORY. It's good theory. But it cannot be proven by any measurable source, because again, all that one can really prove is that evolution happens, but not that it was the originator of life.
Of course, you can't prove it WRONG either, because once again, there's no way tho accurately measure what was going on a particular instant billions of years ago.
===
I dunno, I think I was pretty objective about the whole thing.
I can also do a similar write-up on Creationism.
-F-
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[OT] Charles Darwin - 
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, so I've posted here. If this is a problem, I won't complain when and wether the topic will be removed.
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