I read the linked article, by Harvard zoologist Richard C. Lewontin, with interest:
The part that stands out is the following admission:
So speciation is an incontrovertible fact, but natural selection really is just a theory (in the weak sense of theory). Religious zealots should take note, because it's the natural selection part of evolution that is truly at war with Judeo-Christian dogma, not the speciation part. Of course, this of itself does nothing to empirically "prove" any religious tradition true.
NOTE: I invite especially Creekser to comment on this because he knows a lot more about the subject than I do.
The part that stands out is the following admission:
In referring to the theory of evolution [Jerry Coyne author of Why Evolution Is True] makes it clear that we do not mean the weak sense of "theory," an ingenious tentative mental construct that might or might not be objectively true, but the strong sense of a coherent set of true assertions about physical reality. In this he is entirely successful.
Where he is less successful, as all other commentators have been, is in his insistence that the evidence for natural selection as the driving force of evolution is of the same inferential strength as the evidence that evolution has occurred. So, for example, he gives the game away by writing that when we examine a sequence of changes in the fossil record, we can "determine whether the sequences of changes at least conform to a step-by-step adaptive process. And in every case, we can find at least a feasible Darwinian explanation."
But to say that some example is not falsification of a theory because we can always "find" (invent) a feasible explanation says more about the flexibility of the theory and the ingenuity of its supporters than it says about physical nature. Indeed in his later discussion of theories of behavioral evolution he becomes appropriately skeptical when he writes that "imaginative reconstructions of how things might have evolved are not science; they are stories." [This observation] allows evolutionary "theory" to fall back into the category of being reasonable but not an incontrovertible material fact.
There is, of course, nothing that Coyne can do about the situation. There are different modes of "knowing," and we "know" that evolution has, in fact, occurred in a stronger sense than we "know" that some sequence of evolutionary change has been the result of natural selection. . . .
Where he is less successful, as all other commentators have been, is in his insistence that the evidence for natural selection as the driving force of evolution is of the same inferential strength as the evidence that evolution has occurred. So, for example, he gives the game away by writing that when we examine a sequence of changes in the fossil record, we can "determine whether the sequences of changes at least conform to a step-by-step adaptive process. And in every case, we can find at least a feasible Darwinian explanation."
But to say that some example is not falsification of a theory because we can always "find" (invent) a feasible explanation says more about the flexibility of the theory and the ingenuity of its supporters than it says about physical nature. Indeed in his later discussion of theories of behavioral evolution he becomes appropriately skeptical when he writes that "imaginative reconstructions of how things might have evolved are not science; they are stories." [This observation] allows evolutionary "theory" to fall back into the category of being reasonable but not an incontrovertible material fact.
There is, of course, nothing that Coyne can do about the situation. There are different modes of "knowing," and we "know" that evolution has, in fact, occurred in a stronger sense than we "know" that some sequence of evolutionary change has been the result of natural selection. . . .
NOTE: I invite especially Creekser to comment on this because he knows a lot more about the subject than I do.
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