Time Immortal

I remain convinced of the validlty of the theory of evolution in general, but I do think Vox raises an excellent point about the recent discovery that the Amazon molly fish’s asexual reproduction has seemingly not caused the species problems in its 70,000 year history — species that reproduce in this manner “normally” see introduced complex genetic errors that over time that will doom the species.

One thing that is annoying about evolutionists is the way that many of them declare they would be happy to abandon it if it were falsified. But every time a genuine falsification is produced, the theory is promptly respun sans substantive modification in such a manner as to dance around the previous falsification. Does anyone truly believe that a single TENS believer would abandon the faith if Haldane’s proverbial rabbit fossils in the Precambrian were found? There are many different reasons that the Molly fish may not, in fact, falsify the theory. But is there a single evolutionary adherent who will disavow it in the absence of those reasons? I doubt it…because it is first and foremost a matter of faith, not science.

Dr Myers, meanwhile, points out that evolution only requires 30 generations. So, now we’ve got a good falsification model for testing a hypothesis based on the theory. Given the reproductive cycles of rats, we can have conclusive proof or falsification of evolutionary theory within five years by seeing if we can turn rats into cud-chewing herbivores or not.

As I’ve observed before, the question regarding faith is not so much whether we believe as it is what we believe, and certainly many people do place a more or less blind faith in science. Joel recently gave us an example of this with his confident assertion that science had not explained everything “yet” — the implication, of course, being that in due time science might just explain everything for us, absolving us of every need to look to the supernatural/divine. That’s unlikely, of course, but some people do cling rather blindly both to the belief that science is able to provide all/the only explanations we might need, and that the methods of science are adequate to discover all that can be discovered.

Neither assertion is demonstrably true, and in fact both assertions are probably false. But there are more than enough people who blindly believe otherwise. Any time you’re banking part of your worldview on a “yet,” you are a person of some faith. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Where faith — whether in God or in science — goes wrong is when it confuses “yet” with hard, cold, facts.