The Science of Biological Evolution (no politics or religion)

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Some idiot posted pornography on the last page, so I have created a new one to allow users to avoid it.

and everyone will be just scrolling up to see what was the fuss is all about.

now everyone will just be clicking back to see what you are on about.

Only if they want to, but they will be puzzled, as the user (Triceratops2016) who posted having been booted, their posts have vanished too. This has also had the effect of scrolling my new page comment up two onto the last page.

Mr. Rocky,

Science is not like you see it 'cuz you're seeing it thru the eyes of others. You need to go sit on an oak limb or at the Mogollon Rim or somewhere other than pouring over what Einstein such & suched about. There is a holistic type of science that exists that merges experience & understanding with creativity. Estrogen entities merge these alot ezier than "others"  . And it doesn't take breaking things up or down & n2 ultra micro/macro chunks and then denying your senses as tho' they don't count for anything. Do you do that ?

The Scientific Method is way too mechanical. Remember, philosophy came b4 the S-M. It was here first & deservedly so. And the SM is ashamedly a derivative of "Why do I feel this way ?" It's actually a subset of philosophical study. And so to deny that philosophy has no part in the S-M deserves the gift of a check-velvet hat from a sleeping harlequin.

You're never gonna fully understand nature without a belief system. Yours happens to be mother nature but she's really not your mom. She just a woman behind a big crimson curtain. Be careful in paying too much attention to her.

Einstein took his belief in a system and replaced it w/ another. So what ?....it's happened many times b4 and it's gonna happen again. Change is what's staying the same. We should be happy about this, embrace it, & realize we actually know basically nothing. Blaise couldn't comprehend physically infinite big or small. And so he arrived where ?....on the planet devoted to the study of Holistic Science. 

Change should excite us, but new ideas should be looked at w/ lotsa skepticism 'cuz we're not living in an arithmetic model....like Einstein's Universe.

Looking out for your best interest,

Lola

You are confusing science, which is entirely about the application of the scientific method to obtain reliable understanding of the real world and some sort of New Age abuse of terminology.

If you don't like the scientific method, you don't like science. But science doesn't care, because its judge is reality, and how well it explains it.

Moreover, the scope of science is clearcut. It has the humility to not see itself as something more than it is. Einstein's theory comprises everything we know about space-time, but nothing more.

The scientific method is far from mechanical. A crucial part of the method is the creation of hypotheses. But these hypotheses are not facts until they have been empirically verfied, even if in some cases the deep understanding of scientists makes them very confident they will be verified (a good example is gravitational waves, an implication of Einstein's theory of 1915, verified by experiment in 2015. Another good example is the existence of a mechanism for transferring unambiguous functional information between generations of organisms - DNA - an implication of Darwin's 19th century theory, only verified in the middle and late 20th century).

A wooly, uncompartmentalised thinking is surely fine in many contexts but simply inappropriate to the delineation of objective facts. Differentiation is crucial to all knowledge: facts have a context and a scope which are essential to their truth.

There are areas of philosophy which are important and are outside of science. A good example is moral philosophy. This is about value judgements and choices of society. The scientific method can provide an input to such discussions (if you do this, such and such is the result), but it does not aspire to provide any answers. Other good examples of things beyond the bounds of science are related include opinions on art or music. Others include life decisions such as choices of relationships, and attitudes to other people.

Where philosophical questions have absolute answers, they generally lie outside of philosophy. Eg the ancient Greeks pondered whether matter was infinitely divisible, and if not what its components were, but the answers had to wait for the scientific method to be applied by Dalton, Rutherford and others. Other answers to philosophical questions are found in mathematics and logic and computer science and so on.

I am sure many people who make wooly comparisons fail to recognise the limited scope of science. It is the best way to do what it does and it is not anything else.

You've kinda been told off and kinda been advised....but that's probably just me trying to be the mom I've never been....buttered w/ my emotions.

It's ok, if you read my post you will realise it was recognised as misdirected!

You discuss Einstein's theory as if it was like a clothing fashion. Let's review the way in which understanding of gravity and space-time has changed over time.

Until the 16th century, people were essentially clueless. No-one even knew how to calculate the path of a thrown rock, for example, so they had only the vaguest idea of gravity. Aristotle is famous for guessing wrongly about the law of gravity and the lack of the scientific method meant his completely false ideas were not corrected for 1500 years. By scientists of course, not by philosophers.

One thing the ancient Greeks got dead right was their mathematics. This was because it is based on logical deduction from axioms, which Euclid understood, and did not require the scientific method (the real world does not provide a mechanism for deduction, only observation. Deduction is entirely with models of reality).

The first person to quantify gravity was Tartaglia, who found formulae to calculate the paths of cannonballs. Later Kepler found some simple rules for the orbits of planets, then finally Newton's great synthesis led to a simple models that dealt with all gravitational interaction.

So the first theory of gravity was Newton's and the first theory of space-time was essentially Euclid's 3-dimensional space plus a separate 1-dimensional time. This has what is called Gallilean invariance, which we now know is like assuming the speed of light is infinite.

General relativity is essentially what you get by first recognising that the speed of light is not infinite, but it is constant, and then recognising that gravity is the result of the distortion of space-time by energy-momentum. All of this was achieved by one person in a few years. A footnote is that it was only discovered in the 1990s that a constant in Einstein's theory was very slightly different to zero (previously, there had been no reason to believe it was not zero) - this is dark energy.

From here, the only possible way to advance is to produce a more complicated, impractical theory that gives indistinguishable predictions from Einstein's in all contexts that are amenable to experiment at the moment, but which deals more precisely with extreme high energy events. At present, physicists can't even see how to build an experiment that could be used to study such a theory.

So, no, your description of the role of Einstein's theory is wrong.