I have a question...

[Trenitay]

Fine. Still if a modern human skeleton were found from 4 Billion years ago, the theory of evolution would be pretty much gone. How can you say people evolved, when a modern human from the beginning of earth was found?

[Enoch]

Fine. Still if a modern human skeleton were found from 4 Billion years ago, the theory of evolution would be pretty much gone. How can you say people evolved, when a modern human from the beginning of earth was found?

And if I exited the Earth's atmosphere the next time I jumped for a rebound on the basketball court, the theory of gravity would be pretty much gone, too.

[Gorth]

Fine. Still if a modern human skeleton were found from 4 Billion years ago, the theory of evolution would be pretty much gone. How can you say people evolved, when a modern human from the beginning of earth was found?

And if I exited the Earth's atmosphere the next time I jumped for a rebound on the basketball court, the theory of gravity would be pretty much gone, too.

 

I think a modern human skeleton that could be dated to 4 billion+ years would give rise to speculations in the field of time travel

[Cycloneman]

The thing is that evolutionary theory, just like any other theory, will not be killed by a single outlier. It would require a systematic observation of improperly located animals; rabbits in the pre-cambrian, trilobites in the modern era, velociraptors coexisting with woolly mammoths, on a consistent scale. If we found one human in the pre-cambrian, we would just call it an outlier. Perhaps it was somehow deposited far deeper than it belonged. Perhaps it was a time traveller. We would no more abandon evolutionary theory due to that than we would abandon the theory of gravity because one object temporarily defied it. If a ball fell up, we wouldn't just throw out gravity; we have huge masses of evidence. We would call that ball an outlier, since the purpose of science is to describe, and gravity describes the universe pretty well..

[Blank]

I agree on that one, Cycloneman, since science is not philosophy or mathematics. Finding one counter-example does not change 'science'. Large and consistent amounts of evidence change theories and hypotheses, but if done properly, the scientific method and approach to discovering, observing, and documenting will remain the same regardless of the subject.

 

Some of my quibble lies with people who make unworkable hypotheses (which are in the realm of science, as those ideas can guide future experiments) and try to make them sound more credible by simply having them under the label.

 

This is funny, though, since I could say God is in the realm of science, but He's just an unworkable hypothesis.

 

Or intelligent design, which is more or less an unworkable hypothesis, but I think if one used the idea to guide their research, it is definitely as in the realm of science as abiogenesis. It may simply be a matter of time to find the "right answer" as you would say.

[Walsingham]

Does anyone else find it weird that a strand of RNA looks uncannily similar to a snake wrapped round a tree?

[Blank]

I think you've been looking through your monocle eye a little too long.