TPP is in a bit of a funk. This happens to many people who anticipating some hints of spring wake up instead to an overnight snow fall. First, my watch thinks it's Jan. 1, 2005, and then my toast gets overdone. How much can one human stand? A scan of the news finds a both laughable and yet depressing item: creationists in the USA, mostly fundamentalist Christians, want equal time because the new science program Cosmos isn't being fair. Well, science isn't about fairness. What is most troubling is that there are that many people who think science is just a "belief", an "opinion", on an equal footing with 2000 year old creation myths. Will they being going to see the movie Noah and think it a documentary? Well, TPP is not up to it this AM, so here's a quote from the Botanical Society of America's statement on evolution (get the full-text here) with which TPP is intimately acquainted.
"The fairness argument
implies that creationism is a scientifically valid alternative to evolution,
and that is not true. Science is not about fairness, and all explanations are
not equal. Some scientific explanations are highly speculative with little in
the way of supporting evidence, and they will stand or fall based upon rigorous
testing. The history of science is littered with discarded explanations, e.g.,
inheritance of acquired characters, but these weren’t discarded because of
public opinion or general popularity; each one earned that distinction by being
scientifically falsified. Scientists may jump on a “band wagon” for some new
explanation, particularly if it has tremendous explanatory power, something
that makes sense out of previously unexplained phenomena. But for an
explanation to become a mainstream component of a theory, it must be tested and
found useful in doing science."
"To make progress, to
learn more about botanical organisms, hypotheses, the subcomponents of
theories, are tested by attempting to falsify logically derived predictions.
This is why scientists use and teach evolution; evolution offers testable
explanations of observed biological phenomena. Evolution continues to be of paramount
usefulness, and so, based on simple pragmatism, scientists use this theory to
improve our understanding of the biology of organisms. Over and over again,
evolutionary theory has generated predictions that have proven to be true. Any
hypothesis that doesn’t prove true is discarded in favor of a new one, and so
the component hypotheses of evolutionary theory change as knowledge and
understanding grow. Phylogenetic hypotheses, patterns of ancestral relatedness,
based on one set of data, for example, base sequences in DNA, are generated,
and when the results make logical sense out of formerly disparate observations,
confidence in the truth of the hypothesis increases. The theory of evolution so
permeates botany that frequently it is not mentioned explicitly, but the
overwhelming majority of published studies are based upon evolutionary
hypotheses, each of which constitutes a test of an hypothesis. Evolution has
been very successful as a scientific explanation because it has been useful in
advancing our understanding of organisms and applying that knowledge to the
solution of many human problems, e.g., host-pathogen interactions, origin of
crop plants, herbicide resistance, disease susceptibility of crops, and
invasive plants."
