Undead Dragon King said:
This is a long one, but I promise it's worth reading and I would honestly like to hear a reply (send a PM if you don't want to continue on in this already lengthy thread). (Edit: I don't intend any offence when I say that you don't understand these things. The main problem in this thread is that a lot of people arguing
against you don't seem to understand them well either.)
You misunderstand empiricism. Empiricism is simply a belief in induction based on evidence. All it states is that knowledge can be derived by observation. For instance, you have observed the sun rising each day and you probably claim to have the knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow. Or you have observed that the sun generates heat and you probably claim to know that other stars generate heat too. You can claim that you don't "know" these things, but then we're just arguing about what "know" means. It gets silly pretty quickly since you behave exactly as though you know these things, planning each day with the assumption that there will be light from the sun at certain times.
What you're talking about is an extremely strong form of empiricism suggesting that we can only falsify hypotheses, never prove them. This quickly becomes an argument over the definition of "proof". It's just another instantiation of the problem of induction. But this sort of Popperian empiricism becomes very awkward when we deal with the fact that rational agents
do act with gradients of belief that go beyond "falsified" and "not falsified".
If you want to criticize this kind of faith, you're not just criticizing science, you're criticizing
all rational belief. The problem of induction applies just as readily to your belief "when I drop this rock, it will fall", as it does to evolution.
As for the missing link, as others have articulated, the concept is both outdated and inherently flawed. First, we have enough intermediaries between humans and the ancestor species we share with the apes to satisfy just about anyone. It was true at one time that we didn't have such intermediaries, which is when that argument arose. But now we do. Then there's the bigger issue of the complete lack of thought about what "missing link" actually means. Evolution proceeds one generation at a time. If you require
every link, then you require that scientists produce
every single organism from the earlier species to the most recent common ancestor of the present species. You're suggesting that the only acceptable evidence would be remains from the original species and then one of its offspring, and then one of the offspring's offspring, and then one of
that offspring's offspring, et cetera until you reach the human most recent common ancestor. The notion is completely absurd.
The "I've never seen an ape change into a human" also shows that you profoundly misunderstand evolution. Apes did not evolve into humans. Apes and humans
shared a particular common ancestor species. And again, we don't just have a few skeletal fragments demonstrating intermediaries anymore, we've unearthed
tons of intermediaries since the missing link argument was first put forward.
Also, evolution isn't some line that converges at a perfect organism. All organisms aren't evolving in the "same direction". In fact, evolution doesn't give us any reason to expect that they're evolving in a "direction" at all. Evolution of unique traits is partially dependent upon random mutation. It would be remarkably hard to deny the existence of random mutation given the evidence we see of it every day (in virtually all organisms), but even if you somehow deny that, you still get evolution with simple trait combination from sexual reproduction: as a gross oversimplification, imagine that one segment of a species population has wing-like apendages for heat dissipation and another has extremely thin webbing between the same bones, if those segments breed the offspring might possess the capability for flight even though neither parent could fly and flight capability wasn't the result of random mutation.
All that needs to be true of a trait for it to pass on is that it improves the ability of the organism bearing the trait to reproduce
at the time it enters the population. It need not even continue to be useful in the future, in fact it might even become
harmful in the future due to combination with a trait evolved later. Since the largescale changes we're talking about are the result of either random or emergent complexity, there is no reason to believe that whales would
ever evolve to develop language, birds computers, or cats rhetorical skills. If those properties somehow emerged due to combination or mutation, then it's fairly likely that they would enhance the ability of the organisms possessing them to pass on their traits, but why would you expect the traits to emerge in the population in the first place?
The fact that humans have evolved the ability to conceive of computers, language, and rhetorical skills is essentially accidental. These traits entered the population approximately at random and happened to confer an advantage to humans, making those humans possessing the traits more successful, and leading to the proliferation of offspring possessing those traits.
See my above post for a better explanation of basic evolution. It really isn't as "special" a concept as a lot of people seem to think. It's just the logical outcome of inheritance and selectional pressure. Since we know that both of those things exist (people inherit traits from parents and some traits improve the odds that the organisms possessing those traits will pass them on), the real question is how you can argue that they
wouldn't lead to evolution.
