Darwin's Theory of Evolution is not scientific

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edwest211 said:
Humani Generis
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Apparently, you don’t know that the Pope has declared that the ToE is compatible with Catholic teaching. Therefore, your ideas neither express science, nor even the Catholic position. They are your own ideas. The problem is that your ideas aren’t particularly good ones-- they are clearly not based on a deep understanding of the science of evolution.
 
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You keep saying that evolution isn’t science, and yet you haven’t seen the many thousands of papers in which scientists do evolutionary science.

Really, you need to stop making up dumb ideas, and then pretending your dumb ideas are the good ideas of careful scientists.
 
Pope Benedict:

"In the book, Benedict reflected on a 1996 comment of his predecessor, John Paul II, who said that Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution were sound, as long as they took into account that creation was the work of God, and that Darwin’s theory of evolution was “more than a hypothesis.”

“The pope (John Paul) had his reasons for saying this,” Benedict said. “But it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.

“We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said."
 
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Benedict clearly isn’t a scientist. His statement shows a particular lack of understanding of basic scientific terminology-- I can see why you like him.
 
So if one pope is not a scientist but likes the theory, that makes him credible?
 
Because I know from our past discussions that your problem with evolution is that it doesn’t accord with your particular literal interpretation of the Bible.

It has nothing to do with Catholic faith, which the Church has quite repeatedly and explicitly made clear. The Theory of Evolution is perfectly compatible with Catholic faith, so long as you accept God as the ultimate cause of all those processes that lead to a change in species.

Why you confuse deliberate (and completely unnecessary) ignorance with the Catholic faith is beyond me to understand. It’s neither required by the Church, nor consistent with the observations of God’s creation which scientists are spending thousands of human lifetimes making.
 
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I’m not saying which Popes are or are not credible. I’m saying that the Catholic Church has quite constantly said that the Theory of Evolution is not in conflict with its teachings.

Benedict’s comment about a previous pope’s endorsement of evolution were clearly not doctrinal, and were clearly spoken by a man who doesn’t really know anything about science.
 
Again, Neanderthals had literally nothing to do with modern humans and that changed to some of us have Neanderthal DNA. That’s the only kind of change I’m observing.
 
Well, that’s your opinion. Did you know he was a university professor?
 
What does this have to do with the OP, or with the ToE in general?
 
The scientific method requires testability and repeatability. We cannot haul all of the alleged previous ancestors into the laboratory.
 
You are parroting something you learned in grade 8 science class. The way in which observations are made, hypotheses tested, and theories supported or contradicted, is much more complex than that.

What you are referring to is specifically scientific experimentation, in which confounding variables are controlled in order to test a hypothesis about a particular physical relationship.
 
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Scientists can only deal with what’s alive today. That’s all I’m saying. So, if scientist A discovers that a certain mRNA has a certain effect on protein production, other scientists can confirm it or challenge the result or fail to get the same result.
 
This is not correct.

Scientists can only deal with INFORMATION that is available today. Sometimes confirmation for hypotheses comes from predicting what data will be found in the future.

An evolutionary hypothesis might say something like, “We predict if we dig in stratum X in region Y, we are likely to find species with characteristics Z.” Then they spend a few years’ digging and see what they find.

It’s not a controlled experiment, exactly, but it still follows the basic cycle that is the essence of science:
  1. FIRST, observations
  2. SECOND, make a hypothesis about why things are the way they are
  3. THIRD, look for evidence which supports or contradicts the hypothesis.
The point of the scientific experimental method you mentioned is that it is sometimes necessary to remove confounding variables in order to make new observations valuable enough to be usable. But that’s not always the case.

The problem with ID and other religious claims, by the way, is that the process is inverted. Very clearly, they start with the hope that it can be shown that God did everything, and then look to see if they can make the data fit some compatible theory.

This is all wrong. You must first start with observation. Then you make hypotheses that don’t require untestable (name removed by moderator)uts like miracles or divine intervention.

It is where you cannot make physical observations that science fails horribly, in my opinion. A good example is the science of mind. We can’t see a mind, touch it, or manipulate it directly. To study the mind at all, we have to make philosophical assumptions-- for example, that neural correlates to mental activity ARE the mental activity. But that so obviously begs the question that it must be discarded as very poor science indeed.
 
If Darwin entitled his book, “On the Variations Intra-Species” then, as a good scientist, he would have hypothesized within his data. He did not and so he is not.
 
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