Posts Tagged ‘scientific method’

Anti-Science, evolution and climate change are now at the center of the 2012 Presidential campaign. The answers to the head-turning question, “Do you believe in evolution?” gets top media attention even though few politicians have biology training beyond Biology 101. Of course, “does life have meaning and purpose?” is the real core of the question.

The use of the term Anti-Science today has evolved to mean anti-evolution and anti-climate change. How candidates manage the “evolution” question will likely leverage an effect on the final vote next year.” Question like “Do you believe in evolution” are now one of the most dreaded types of questions on the political campaign trail. But, what is Anti-Science? As we will see, the history of the Anti-Science is an amazing saga of irony.

At the core of the Anti-Science debate is the definition of Science. The Oxford English Dictionary says that science is “a method of procedures that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” Continue Reading

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin developed his revolutionary theory of “slight, successive” evolutionary changes. During the mid-nineteenth century, however, knowledge about genes and genetics was speculative at best, no less the evolution of genes.

In fact, Darwin abandoned the scientific method and declared that his theory of evolution was based on speculation –

I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.

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The following is a book review by Lisa Lewis on Darwin Then and Now, The Most Amazing Story in the History of Science  recently published in the May-June 2011 issue of Home School Enrichment Magazine:

“Looking for a textbook that teaches your high school science students about the fallacies of the theory of evolution? Darwin, Then and Now challenges the evolutionary theory with a critical examination of the science and history of evolution. Written by Professor Richard William Nelson, this book is an in-depth study of the most amazing story in the history of science, the rise of the evolutionary theory. Darwin, Then and Now, is a must-read for the home school science student. Continue Reading

For Charles Darwin, natural selection was the key natural law driving evolution, as reflected in the title, On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection. Natural selection was envisioned as the mechanism for the origin of species—evolution.

Darwin declared – “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” In essence, natural selection was simply founded on a belief.

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“On the Imperfection of the Geological Record” is the title of Chapter 10 in The Origin of Species. The fossil record has been as a problem for evolution, then and now.

Stressing the importance of the fossil record to the theory of evolution Charles Darwin wrote – “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

Evidence for these “numerous, successive, slight modifications” in the fossil record remains a cornerstone to establish scientifically the theory of evolution. Darwin recognized, however, that the fossil record, “not being blended together by innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”

Since 1859, the unsuccessful search through the fossil record for the expected intermediate or transitional links has produced a legacy of fraud. Continue Reading

Charles Darwin, desperate to discover how evolution keeps going, in 1865, sent his good friend, Thomas Huxley, a thirty-page manuscript under the heading “The Hypothesis of Pangenesis.” Huxley’s response must have been discouraging, since Darwin replied, “I do not doubt your judgment is perfectly just and I will persuade myself not to publish. The whole affair is much too speculative.”

Pangenesis extended Aristotle’s concept of “spontaneous generation,” later popularized by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Still anxious, two years late in 1867 Darwin sent a letter to American scientist, Asa Gray at Harvard University -

The chapter on what I call Pangenesis will be called a mad dream, and I shall be pretty well satisfied if you think it a dream worth publishing; but at the bottom of my own mind I think it contains a great truth.

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Contrary to popular opinion, The Origin of Species was not a scientific work, and Charles Darwin makes that point very clear –

I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.

Rather, Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument”—not a scientific showcase. Darwin makes this point because he knew what differentiates science from logic.

More than 200 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, English scientist Francis Bacon formalized what is now known as the Scientific Method – the only proven method of scientific inquiry for discovering natural laws.

As a founding member of the Royal Society, Bacon was quoted by Darwin in the preamble of The Origin of Species. The Scientific Method had earlier been used by Copernicus and Galileo overturning the geocentric worldview, and later by Isaac Newton that lead to the discovery of the natural laws of motion and gravity. Continue Reading

 
Fossils fascinated and frustrated Charles Darwin. While on the HMS Beagle expedition, “I have been wonderfully lucky with fossil bones,” Darwin wrote. “Some of the animals must have been of great dimensions: I am almost sure that many of them are quite new.”

At Bahia Blanca, Darwin discovered a very large fossil that was complete. The geological location of the fossil find was problematic, however. The location of the fossil was below a layer of white seashells, similar to the layer he found on the island of Santiago.

This puzzled Darwin. How could the large fossil be located below an ocean deposit, not above? Darwin knew this observation contradicted what Charles Lyell had proposed in his Principles of Geology. Continue Reading

Darwin’s preamble to the first edition of The Origin of Species includes quotations from William Whewell’s popular book entitled Bridgewater Treatise and Francis Bacon’s sentential work entitled Advancement of Learning. From different worldview, both Whewell and Bacon advocated the use of inductive reasoning—the scientific method.

 Bacon (January 1561 – April 1626) is noted as one of the founders of the Scientific Revolution that eventually lead to the establishment of the Royal Society by Charles II in 1660. Whewell, one of Darwin’s dons at Cambridge University, is credited for coining the term “scientist.” 

Taking a comprehensive approach to the study of evolution, Darwin presented the two different worldviews of Bacon and Whewell. Whewell, envisioning nature apart from a “Divine” intervention,

“But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this-we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.”

Bacon, by contrast, envisioned nature as part of “God’s work,”

“To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both.”

Darwin teaches, by example, to embrace the exploration of diverse worldviews. Modern education should take Darwin’s approach and “teach the controversy.”

Darwin, in a letter to Asa Gray at Harvard University in September 1860, Darwin wrote that “embryology is to me by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of the theory.

Just two months before the release of the first edition of The Origin of Species in September 1859, Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell, “Embryology in Chapter VIII is one of my strongest points I think.”

Writing in his autobiography, Darwin recalls: “Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I was at work on the Origin, as the explanation of the wide difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult animal.”

Darwin’s premise was that the similarity between the structure and the embryo of animal and man was primary proof that man evolved from animals. In The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin writes in the first chapter that embryology provides the “ample and conclusive evidence in favour of the principle of gradual evolution.”

Darwin was not an embryologist, and instead relied on the work of others. In The Origin of Species, Darwin gave credit to Ernst Haeckel: “Professor Haeckel in his “Generelle Morphologie” and in [other] works has recently brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings. In drawing up the several series he trusts chiefly to embryological characters [to establish evolutionary sequences].”

Based on what Darwin thought was scientific evidence concluded: “So again it is probable, from what we know of the embryos of mammals, birds, fishes, and reptiles, that these animals are the modified descendants of some ancient progenitor.”

In The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, “Thus, as it seems to me, the leading facts in embryology, which are second to none in importance, are explained on the principles of variation in the many descendants from some … ancient progenitor”

During the twentieth-century, Haeckel’s embryos were prominently displayed in nearly every biology textbook, even though Haeckel eventually confessed that the drawings were fraudulent.

In January 1909, Haeckel’s confession was published as a letter in the Munchener Allegemeine Zeitung, an international weekly publication for the sciences, arts, and technology. In the letter, Haeckel clearly states that the drawings were contrived by “comparative synthesis” and not by accurate reproduction. Without the fraud, the expected evolutionary embryonic sequences had obvious gaps. Haeckel concedes, “a small portion of my embryo pictures (possibly 6 or 8 in a hundred) are really ‘falsified’.”

Even more sadly, Haeckel’s only defense was that fraudulent practices were an accepted practice even by some of the “most esteemed biologists” of the day. Haeckel wrote, “After this compromising confession of ‘forgery’ I should be obliged to consider myself condemned and annihilated if I had not the consolation of seeing side by side with me in the prisoner’s dock hundreds of fellow culprits, among them many of the most trusted observers and most esteemed biologists. The great majority of all the diagrams in the best biological textbooks, treatises, and journals would incur in the same degree the charge of ‘forgery,’ for all of them are inexact, and are more or less doctored, schematised, and constructed.” Indeed the scientific method had been abandoned not only by Darwin and Haeckel, but also by a large segment of the profession of biology.

Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University and author of the famous overpopulation book, The Population Bomb, wrote in 1963 that Haeckel’s law now only has a leading role in mythology—not in science. “This generalization was originally called the biogenetic law by Haeckel and is often stated as ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’ This crude interpretation of embryological sequences will not stand close examination, however. Its shortcomings have been almost universally pointed out by modern authors, but the idea still has a prominent place in biological mythology.”

Like Haeckel’s embryo drawings, the history of evolution  has been laced with an insidious legacy of fraud.