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Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective
Darwin:
Deozaan - I don't have a problem with you rejecting Darwinism and/or evolution but puh-lease don't dismiss it as just a theory! When you do so, what you are really implying is that it is just an educated guess, and an untested one at that. In reality, what you should be saying is that is an hypothesis (although as we'll see even an hypothesis is much more than "merely" an educated guess). A very simplistic definition of an hypothesis is that it is an educated guess. What we mean by an educated guess is that when we seek to explain some phenomenon or phenomena that we observe around us we draw upon existing knowledge to explain it - ie we generally base hypotheses on previous observations or on extensions of scientific theories. Key to being able to describe an educated guess as being a hypothesis rather than, well, a random guess, is that a hypothesis must be both falsifiable and repeatable. So, anyone reading the hypothesis should be able to test it themselves and it must be possible to negate the hypothesis - ie provie it wrong. This does not mean that all hypotheses must be wrong, what it means is that it must be possible to come up with If...then statements to test it with. That is, if my hypothesis is true, then x,y, and z must also be true (or be wrong). So, if an hypothesis is tested against one of these (or many of these) if...then statements and the statement holds true, the hypothesis has passed that test. Two points here, even though the hypothesis passes a particular test it may fail another one today, tomorrow or a thousand years from now. Thus, no hypothesis is ever proven to be 100% true. Rather, hypothese can only ever be proven wrong. Now, a theory is a hypothesis, or group of hypotheses, that have been tested many, many times and that have thus far passed every test. A theory, then is a very rigorously tested scientific explanation for something. Finally, a law is a theory that has been tested so many times that no one expects it to fail and eveyone accepts as being as close to "true" as we can hope to get. Note though that if a law were to fail a verified scientific experiment and if the results are replicable the law would have to be rejected.
Wow. While I typed this the thread has moved on! As nontroppo correctly notes, individuals come up with hypotheses while theories are the result of many individuals working independently on the same problem. Deozaan - you are right: if a statement or series of statements cannot be falsified (ie there is no conceivable event/observation/outcome that would lead to it being rejected) then it is not a theory.
nontroppo:
"There are some aspects of quackery that are harmless - childish even - and there are some that are very serious indeed."
nontroppo -
imagine if someone said something like that about your career for example or something you believe in?
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Yes I suppose I would have replaced the word "quack"[1] with "mysticism" if I was him. But as a scientist, I engage with criticism and welcome it, even if it is a post-modernist telling me science is nothing more than a social construction and pure human fantasy ;-) The majority of the post was gentle and I'd hope those serious about homeopathy would not just stop reading at the first sentence.
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[1] Though as homeopathy can show no significant medical efficacy above placebo, to continue convincing people it works better than placebo (and taking their money for it, homeopathy ain't cheap) is debatably closer to quack than mystic...
Darwin:
Just found this quote about theories from Stephen Hawking courtesy of wikipedia:
a theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model which contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations". He goes on to state, "any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation which disagrees with the predictions of the theory.
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nontroppo:
Anyone dismissing Darwin in favor of another explanation is, from a scientific point of view, ignorant or attempt to mislead.
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This is maybe for another thread, but some critiques of the theory of evolution are cogent, articulate and thoughtful. The jump from micro to macro evolution is a battleground that is not yet cleared... That there are many unresolved holes in ToE does not imply that the alternatives are somehow better though ;-)
So if there's a chance it could be proved wrong (it's falsifiable), it's a theory. But if there's no chance it could be proved wrong (creationism/intelligent design), it's not able to be a theory?
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Yup, it becomes a belief, or a dogma. Note there are scientists who are stubbornly dogmatic and would probably twist evidence to maintain their dogma. Scientists are human; sharing mankinds foibles, power trips and irrationality. The scientific method is simply the best way to keep overall progress running forward in spite of this ;)
On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation which disagrees with the predictions of the theory.
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Which is why one black swan is so much more valuable than a lake full of white swans...
Deozaan:
Wow. While I typed this the thread has moved on! As nontroppo correctly notes, individuals come up with hypotheses while theories are the result of many individuals working independently on the same problem. Deozaan - you are right: if a statement or series of statements cannot be falsified (ie there is no conceivable event/observation/outcome that would lead to it being rejected) then it is not a theory.
-Darwin (November 27, 2007, 05:14 PM)
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Thanks for the great explanation. But I'm still a little confused. I think a lot of it probably has to do with the way the layman has mixed up those words, for instance, many times people will say "My theory is because [blah]..." to describe a situation. So perhaps there's room for the distinction between a scientific theory, which follows the scientific method and meets the aforementioned definition, and just a regular old theory, which is more like the basic definition of a hypothesis.
But right now, as I'm trying to adjust my own personal definition of these words, and re-categorize things (if necessary) based on these definitions, I'm left wondering how there can be any observed and verified conclusions to theories such as big-bang, darwinism.
Some of the articles I've just read from this thread said that evolution has tons of undebatable evidence, but I don't see where. Sure, we have fossils and bones, and in some cases preserved corpses of old creatures, but how does that prove that these creatures are pre-evolutions of any other creatures? I know it can't be proven, but why is it accepted as as factual as it can be when perhaps maybe they were just different creatures that are now extinct? How can it be accepted as true when it's just as likely that evolution doesn't exist and there have just been a bunch of creatures over the eons that have similar features?
I'm not trying to get into an argument against darwinism. I'm just trying to figure out how it has been verified, since evolution is a scientific theory, and the definition of a scientific theory is something that has repeatedly been verified. I guess what I'm asking is, what are the If...Then tests that have passed?
I'm also curious about the Big Bang theory. How can we verify something that happened zillions of years ago when no one was around to witness? How did that change from an educated guess to a scientific theory that has been verified repeatedly and become "accepted as true by the scientific community as a whole"? What tests did that hypothesis pass to become a theory?
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