My aim is to summarize and highlight the various arguments, rather than to put forth my own view as right. This is my best effort at achieving NPOV, and I'm sure that any unconscious bias which has slipped through will be boldly corrected by others. --Ed Poor
If you want the Creationism page to be an argument that Creationism in all its forms is wrong or unscientific, why not say so and be done with it? Otherwise, let's make an Evolution Debate page.
I think when presenting a theory, we should explain why its adherents believe it.
Also, I think there's an attempt to identify Sudden Creationism with Creationism. It's not the clear majority view, according to the only survey I ever heard of. Surely the omission of Intelligent Design is not a deliberate attempt to deceive.
Come on, gentlemen. Where's that NPOV you're always talking about?
Even something so easily falsifiable as Aristotle's theory of motion was once believed by the vast majority of authorities. The trouble is, no one before Galileo ever bothered to check it.
(It turned out that sufficiently dense bodies fall with a speed that is proportional to how long they've been falling -- not how heavy they are. So a five-pound cannonball and a ten-pound cannonball hit the ground at the same time, while other objects such as a feather reach will have already reached their terminal velocities.)
How about: "A very large ['vast' pours salt in the wound] majority of practising scientists, theologians and philosophers of science believe scientific creationism and intelligent design theory [identifying these as 'neologisms' in this context is to dismiss them]--terms many of them cannot use without shuddering--to be untenable, either because they are scientifically unsupportable and unverifiable, or because they are outright nonsense." --LMS
One can carry the "lack of bias" mantra too far. If Wikipedia didn't officially endorse evolutionary science, it would be derelict in its duty to educate. Its only obligation to non-bias is to accurately report that some people choose not to believe in evolution. It should also not call those people idiots, or otherwise make derogatory comments about them (the word "nonsense" is probably a bit strong, though I happen to believe that, and I like the rest of LMS's phrasing). But it most definitely should report accurately that evolution, as endorsed with near unanimity among educated biologists, accurate describes the biological world, and that creationism does not. The article on Numerology is a good example: it clearly shows why it doesn't make sense, accurately identifies it as nonscientific, and merely reports that some people believe it. --LDC
I don't think encyclopedias should be in the business of doing anything other than stating facts that sane, thinking people--among whom I would include, yes, creationists--can agree upon. If not on the subject matter itself, then they can usually agree on how competing views are characterized; or at least they can agree to allow each side to be permitted to characterize its own view sympathetically and to criticize other views. When an article becomes contentious, I think we should "go meta."
Why should there be any resistance to this? I'm very curious to know. Do you want to have a (another) debate about this on neutral point of view? --Larry Sanger
P.S. I find your resistance to the word "nonsense" puzzling, and it indicates that, perhaps, you aren't entirely understanding the nonbias policy the way I understand it. I think it is all-important that the claim of nonsense is attributed to someone, rather than asserted to be the case by the author of the article itself. When it is attributed to someone, it immediately becomes uncontroversial and straightforwardly fact-stating (no matter how irritating to creationists). --LMS
As for creationists still being thinking and sane people, well - yes, they probably are. But that doesn't mean that the hypothesis is any less ridiculous. Aristotle believed in physics that can be disproved with a bowl and some water. And what will we do with the views of historical revisionists? --JG
You say "neutrality is about stating facts rather than opinions." Well, that's a quick-and-easy way to put it. It is more accurate to say that, where there is significant disagreement on a point, then neutrality demands that the disagreement be fairly characterized. Be careful to understand what this does and does not imply. It does imply that evolutionary science not be stated as fact and creation science as obviously false (rather, it implies that these views be described as being held by certain groups of people, and then the public can draw their own conclusions; you don't mind that they draw their own conclusions, do you?). It does not imply that, whenever you mention anything about evolutionary theory, you say something to the effect that creationists disagree. It does not imply that you outright assert, "Evolution is just a hypothesis." This too would be hugely controversial. You would be fully in your rights to say that most scientists fully believe evolution to be a very well-substantiated theory, as well-substantiated as many less controversial theories.
In general, and most importantly, this principle does not imply that our articles have to look like we think that evolutionary theory and creationism are equally weighted, and we (Wikipedia article authors) can't make up our minds. If you think that's what it implies, you don't understand the principle. Don't you think it's possible not to take an official stand, and yet still very strongly be in favor of one of the views? Of course it is. Why would you resist doing this, then, when you can (after all) say that most respected scientists reject creationism? It seems you want to cow creationists and people whose minds are not made up--as silly as they might seem to you and me--into believing what you believe. That's never the right way to go about it. Is there something wrong with letting people draw their own conclusions?
The Wikipedia articles on controversial subjects are not likely to change any minds. The kooks will go on believing kooky things, the rational people will go on being rational, and we can take enormous pride in reporting accurately on the situation.
As to historical revisionists, sometimes they're right, eh? And even when they're not, sometimes their views need to be reported--if only as a fascinating sociological phenomenon. --LMS
Historical revisionists are probably more important even. Yes, they can be interesting, but statement of their opinions as anything even resembling potential fact isn't just wrong, it is potentially offensive. To take the extreme example, even if it invokes Godwin's law against myself, what do you suppose would be the response if we said the holocaust was something widely considered to have occured by most historians, rather than something that occured? I'd consider that an awful legitamization of some of the worst opinions available. Or would you throw out such claims and keep those of other revisionists, less offensive but certainly no more valid? I say the best ground for decision is on merit; meritless arguments should not need consideration, unless we want to pretend all of reality is an opinion. And those probably include young earth creationism.
--Jmlynch
I think we all agree with your arguments, and even with your value judgement that Wikipedia articles should be fact-stating and unbiased (two very independent goals). I think our disagreements here are with (1) the standard by which we decide that something is a fact, and (2) the extent of implied bias in fact-stating prose. There is no such thing as a fact without a standard by which it is judged to be a fact--even simple observational statements like "Fred claims that grass is green" imply that someone at some point judged this to be a fact because he observed Fred saying it (thus "direct observation" being the standard), and might be argued by someone. I happen to think "agreed upon with near unanimity by persons educated in the field" is a sufficient criterion for factualness. Sure, that will occasionally require us to change when some new discovery upsets an established fact, but so what? Any standard will require change--so why not choose one that's useful. Even your stricter standard of "totally uncontroversial" is no guarantee against future change.
Further, one can easily propagandize by stating only facts. A full page of "Creationists believe that...because..." with no reference to contradictory evidence or any other claim is clearly a propaganda piece, even though it happens to be fact-stating. The goal of eliminating bias requires more than merely being fact-stating. It also requires us to judge the rhetorical effect of an article, and to add rebutting facts where needed. I also believe that it is fundamentally impossible to eliminate all bias, and the all readers of any purportedly-factual article should understand that all authors have biases, and read in that context.
I hold the additional value judgments that Wikipedia should be lucid and useful. I believe that being overly afraid of bias sometimes compromises those goals, by cluttering articles with reportage on clearly useless beliefs held by a few minorities. This latter is certainly open to argument. Yes, an article specifically about Creationism (which is by its very nature a controversial belief) should probably stick to making claims about who said what, how many believe what, and how such beliefs compare to other scientific and theological beliefs. Reporting on a controversy as a controversy is a worthwhile thing for an encyclopedia to do. The articles should also point out arguments on both sides, but we should further report what are actual arguments and what are simply unsupported claims, because that is useful. Even the article on evolution should probably mention that there are a few people who choose to dispute it, and point to the article on Creationism, though it should otherwise be written simply and clearly by treating it as a the ordinary uncontroversial fact it is.
General articles on biology, on the other hand, should simply treat evolution as uncontroversial, because no serious biologist disagrees, and failure to do so compromises understanding of the subject. Articles about radiocarbon dating or tree rings should not be cluttered with an unnecessary reference to the fact that a few folks happen to believe that God placed all of the old rocks and trees here 6000 years ago, and is just trying to confuse us. --LDC
The simple belief that the world as it exists was created by a supernatural being is not what we are talking about here. The word "creationist" is never used to mean that; the word means denial of biological evolution, and that's what we're talking about. What you describe is merely Theism. --LDC
Creationism is not an 'effort to arrive at a rational answer'. Rationality has nothing to do with it. As any theologian will tell you, the project of rationalizing the existence of a creator has fallen into disrepute for various reasons. Creationists can believe whatever they like about the history of life, but that does not mean they make scientific statements.
--Jmlynch
'effort to arrive at a rational answer' = "I can see what caused z; y caused it. I can see what caused y; x caused it. I have investigated until I am blue in the face, and cannot tease out of the universe what caused a. Maybe whatever caused it is not natural, but super-natural. Maybe that's why I can't get at it." This may not be scientific method, but it is how people rationalize. Ie, it is an effort to arrive at rational answer.
This is where creationism as a subject comes from. Then we later on down the road get into such things as oral tradition, legends, myths, scriptures, and other means of passing down the stories about the supernatural. Never proved nor disproved, neither provable nor disprovable by scientific means, they are, by definition, unscientific. Now there are some parts of this tradition which seem to run afoul of scientific evidence. The most notable of these in recent time involves timescale of this planet and origin of species. When the scientist points this out to the dyed-in-the-wool hardline fundamental biblical literalist, the irresistible force meets the immoveable object. At the same time, bits and pieces of biblical history are verfied by archaeology daily. So, "See! The Bible is the infallible word of God!" and the scientist cringes.
BUT it is not necessarily the case that unscientific = wrong, any more that it is the case that proof of bible history a = proof of the whole bible.
To say that creationists believe that someone created things in the beginning is not to say that they beleive, 1-for-1, that SCIENCE in its infinite wisdom, ultimate arbiter of all human knowledge, is wrong. It is to say - "we believe these extra-scientific facts to be true." And who is to gainsay them?
When writing about evolution, that other topic, explain what theories it encompasses.
When writing about creationism, explain what theories it encompasses.
When writing about cosmologies, mention creationism. It happens to be one such.
Why is it necessary to flay the creationist? Has someone here disproven that a supreme influence, possibly an intelligent one, created the universe? Has someone read the report of a researcher who has? I think not. It's unfalsifiable. So it's unscientific. That does not make it wrong, or even irrational. "The geologic record does not support a literal biblical version of planetary time scale and origin of species." So how does that invalidate creationism as an overall subject?
and...
Blatantly stealing from Webster:
Main Entry: cre·a·tion·ism Pronunciation: -sh&-"ni-z&m Function: noun Date: 1880
Hey LDC - how do mean creationism is "never" used to mean that the world as it exists was created by a supernatual being?
OK, then, describe that as another sense of the word. The most common meaning of the word is as your definition above describes it: that various forms of life were created, as opposed to the belief that they evolved from a single earlier form. This is what a newspaper or magazine would generally mean when they describe someone as a "creationist writer" or something. If you choose to also use the word to mean mere theist, or to think of creationism as cosmology rather than biology, I suppose you're free to do so, but that's a second sense of the word, and perhaps separate articles should treat them as such. --LDC
If webster and I are wrong as to what the word means, then we'd better re-write the wikipedia article to reflect that creationism is only anti-evolutionism and nothing else.
Then the article is misleading: the very first sentence says that creationism is the belief that a supreme being "created the physical universe and all life contained therein." Make up your mind: if you are a calling it a cosmology, then you can't include life, because life evolved long after the birth of the universe. If you want to include life, then call it a biology and take your lumps from the evolutionists. --LDC
Before I reply, let me just say that if we can agree that creationism as it stands, apart perhaps from the fact that the evolutionist insists on having the last word, is adequately unbiased, then our dispute is probably academic. So--on with the academic dispute!
I totally agree with your guys' attitude toward creationism. I think it's silly nonsense, too. Let's get that straight--we don't need to debate the merits of the theory (unless Bruce wants to do so). Moreover, I am probably the biggest commonsense realist and defender of rationality here. If you think my position is rooted in anything like relativism, that is excellent evidence that you don't understand my position and that you need to re-read what I've written more carefully. Jimbo, too, is a realist and defender of rationality, and he shares my view (in generalities, at least), as you can see on neutral point of view. Gee, how can that be? Read on.
Why on earth would I wanna do that, Larry? It's not like I advocate Creationism as such or anything. I only tried to point out that beating on the creationists is counter-productive. - AyeSpy (aka BrucieBaby)
1. Is evolution controversial? Yes--to the public at large, which will be reading Wikipedia. No--to scientists. For whom are we writing? The public at large--and scientists. (Perhaps that's what causes our problem here.) Lee says: "General articles on biology, on the other hand, should simply treat evolution as uncontroversial, because no serious biologist disagrees, and failure to do so compromises understanding of the subject." I think this is wrong on two counts. First, while evolution is uncontroversial among serious biologists, it is controversial among an alarmingly large portion of the general public; you do them and yourselves no favors by ignoring this controversy. Second, I see no reason to believe that recognizing that nonbiologists do not accept evolution as fact in any way "undermines understanding" of evolution. It doesn't even undermine your real goal, of course, which is to get people to accept evolution instead of getting caught up in idiotic creationist nonsense. In fact, the opposite is true: by failing to recognize the controversy, you essentially alienate the people you most want to teach. You would prefer indoctrination, it seems.
I think you may overestimate the controversy over evolution in the general public, but I agree with your point wholeheatedly - AyeSpy
2. Will we have to qualify every statement, or even every page, with a statement to the effect that it is the view of scientists? No, of course not. Why not? Because it's not controversial to anyone. Will we have to highlight discredited minority views as prominently as scientific fact? Of course not.
3. If we do describe scientific fact as what is accepted by all or nearly all scientists, then how are we misleading anyone? The question, again, is how? Have we encouraged anyone to believe anything other than what you want them to believe? Where's the downside you all fear?
4. Josh writes: "Historical revisionists are probably more important even. Yes, they can be interesting, but statement of their opinions as anything even resembling potential fact isn't just wrong, it is potentially offensive." Josh, I am not saying that historical revisionism should be presented as "anything even resembling potential fact." I am saying that the view should be described and appropriately attributed. How does that imply that the opinions will be presented as "anything even resembling potential fact"? Please bear in mind that we can reserve plenty of room for attributed explanations of why mainstream historians regard various kinds of historical revisionism as so much hokum. Our including such explanations is absolutely essential to having an unbiased encyclopedia, by the way.
5. Josh again: "To take the extreme example, even if it invokes Godwin's law against myself, what do you suppose would be the response if we said the holocaust was something widely considered to have occured by most historians, rather than something that occured? I'd consider that an awful legitamization of some of the worst opinions available." I would say that this is a very poor illustration (i.e., a "straw man") of my position. I imagine we should first clearly present what is generally believed about the Holocaust; then, perhaps quite far down in the article, we should have a paragraph or two that says something to the effect that the above is accepted (in generalities anyway) by all but a very small handful of trained historians, called Holocaust deniers and revisionists, blah blah blah, and explain the facts of that. This then attributes the claims about the Holocaust in a perfectly appropriate way and also mentions the fact that there is another (very minority) view. At the same time, we can state that most historians (most people) find such revisionism not only obviously false, but extremely morally repugnant. I hope I am making my position clearer now.
6. Is my position "spineless"? Jmlynch thinks so: "in accordance with the views of 99% of theologians, scientists and philosophers, they are wrong. We should state so emphatically. To do otherwise is to be spineless. ... This, I assure you, is contrary to the aims of any good project (particularly if it is haunted by the shades of the original Encyclopediestes)." Well, as a modern-day encyclopedist who has thought for many, many hours about this stuff (even before I started working on an encyclopedia), I can "assure you" that our doing what I ask is not in the slightest "spineless." Well, so much for mutual assurances; now to arguments. I think I can understand your reason for thinking so. Your assumption appears to be that, if we do not explicitly declare something to be true, then the reader can draw certain inferences about us--such as that we wish to placate creationists, or that we think creationism might be scientifically respectable, or that we might be creationists ourselves, etc., etc. Well, no. Reasonable people do not draw such inferences when presented with unbiased texts. You yourself, Jim, would not typically draw such inferences--you know better, of course. Suppose that a history text adopted a policy of failing to identify Nazi scum as the murdering bastards they were--but simply reported the facts about what they did. Would it be reasonable to assume that the text's author(s) might just be willing to admit the possibility that the Nazis were upstanding citizens doing a service to Europe?
Factually, I have read some very dry and "non-judgemental" accounts, practically devoid of adjectives. They still gave me the heebeejeebees and I never thought for a moment the author favored the Nazis. - AyeSpy
-- The facts about what they did, simply reported, permit most readers to judge for themselves that the Nazis were in fact "murdering bastard scum". Readers who make the judgement that the Nazis were in fact "upstanding citizens doing a service to Europe" would probably not be influenced by the editor's stating his/her personal opinion to the contrary. Arguably, we are insulting the reader by assuming he/she needs to be "pushed" to see things our way. -- 27 Septenber 2001.
7. Are being fact-stating and unbiased independent goals? No: in order to be unbiased, you must be fact-stating. In particular, you must be very clear about how you word the facts about what various majority and minority positions are. I contrast (in the present context--not when I'm talking metaphysics & philosophy of language, where 'fact' is a technical term) fact with opinion; opinions can be correct (and thus fact-stating), but one identifies something as a fact to emphasize that it is not under dispute, and one identifies something as an opinion in order to emphasize that it is under dispute. If, in our evolution article, we say that evolution is a "proven fact," while this is no doubt true (i.e., evolutionary theory has met ordinary standards of scientific evidence), the force of saying it is that evolution is simply not under dispute. Well, it is under dispute by your readers, guys. And (damnably) that's a fact. You aren't going to change their minds, or make the world otherwise any safer for rationality and science (which I love at least as much as you do), by explicitly averring that evolution is a fact and creationism is false. Actually, what you do is close off the avenues of discourse by doing so, setting up the less-rational folk in an antagonistic stance toward you, and make it harder to help them see the light. (Think of this as intellectual diplomacy.)
8. "Further, one can easily propagandize by stating only facts." Very true; that's why we shouldn't refer to my position as merely that articles should be fact-stating. They should be unbiased. I've explained what I mean by this in many different places many different times. "A full page of 'Creationists believe that...because...' with no reference to contradictory evidence or any other claim is clearly a propaganda piece, even though it happens to be fact-stating." I totally agree, and I will thank you for not setting up further caricatures of my view.
9. "I also believe that it is fundamentally impossible to eliminate all bias, and the all readers of any purportedly-factual article should understand that all authors have biases, and read in that context." But whenever we can identify bias, we can eliminate it--one way or another, and usually by going "meta." Give yourself some credit; people are creative; we can think of ways to eliminate bias when we spot it. (If you're still not convince, I suspect this is because you have a useless, impossibly-restrictive concept of bias. Personally, I prefer my concepts to be useful.)
10. "I believe that being overly afraid of bias sometimes compromises those goals, by cluttering articles with reportage on clearly useless beliefs held by a few minorities." Why think that articles will be cluttered with views held by minorities? If they are minority views, they will not be highlighted and ubiquitous in the same way that the majority views will be. That's as it should be. No one can reasonably complain.
My conclusion:
We should not impose our values on other thinking people. You are all liberal-minded people, I trust--not liberal politically, necessarily, but liberal in the sense that you want to free minds. I enjoin you to think carefully about the best way to achieve this. By failing to take stands on controversial issues, we aren't demonstrating weakness--in fact, we are demonstrating the strength of our faith in the minds of our fellow human beings. We should let them arrive at their own conclusions. We should trust them to use their own minds--just as you want to be trusted. More benighted souls than our enlightened selves will appreciate our stance and be more apt to listen when we hand down the truth.
I don't know if I can make my case any more completely...
No need to... - AyeSpy
Larry
I would like to expand upon something you mentioned in passing that I think is important: you mentioned that an article might written largely as though uncontroversial, followed by a mention that the text above is believed by a majority, but controversial in that others believe something else (which is then linked to). I think this is a great method of doing it, and if using this technique meets with your approval I wholeheartedly endorse it as a way to write both lucidly and without bias. This seems appropriate for the article on the majority view, while the article on the minority view might be written more from the minority's own viewpoint (though careful to remain fact-stating).
Finally, I have encountered some places where I think minor amounts of open bias in an otherwise factual article is useful and not very controversial, so some simple method of doing those appropriately is needed. The specific example I have in mind is my pages on poker, which are full of opinions like "X makes a more interesting game than Y", or "game X is best played with betting structure Y", or "clay chips are easier to use than thin plastic ones", and so on. I originally wrote most of this text as a potential book which was full of my personal opinions. In the process of Wikifying it have removed opinions that were more significant and might be more controversial ("many casinos have rule X, which is stupid and counterproductive"), but those other little tidbits are the kind of thing I think someone learning the game of poker from a text such as this will want to know, and I think it's a waste of time to reword them all into "many poker players believe..." form. Of course if someone does object at some point (perhaps a manufacturer of plastic chips?), then rewording and pointing to other opinions might be necessary, but until then, I think they are clean and useful as they are. --LDC
Scientists believing in evolution as part of their work (basically all geologists and a good chunk of biologists) have made themselves easy targets for the religious loonies.
Evolution as taught and published in research papers, up to about 1980 was almost always a crock of unscientific shit, based more on bizarre ethical and religious ideas that hardly anyone belived, than on any observational basis, or any relationship with other well-founded scientific theories. That it took a bunch of loonies with no interest in science to put these failings on the agenda is very sad.
Since then evolutionary scientists have started to put their house in order. They still have a way to go, but some of the leading biologists and geologists are now researching evolution in a scientific way, and a genuine scientific theory of evolution is starting to emerge.
In teaching, especially at high school level, evolution is still stuck firmly in the 17th century. I really mean that. Although the name of Darwin is always mentioned, his ideas hardly ever are, and are never taken seriously, let alone some of the more modern ideas.
Maybe some of this should make it into the article (or maybe a different article about history of theory of evolution). Obviously it is not encyclopedia material as is, someone would have to do a complete rewrite from scratch.
According to him, in The Panda's Thumb, I think it was, Creationism is an almost entirely American phenonmenon. He claims that most Europeans, even the most stringently religious, entirely embrace Evolution. John Paul II very nearly ( though not quite ) called evolution incontrovertible awhile ago. Since the only time I've ever been to Europe was a very bitter and unhappy one month stay in Oxford, with not much theological conversation, I was wondering whether or not this could be confirmed by someone who knows more about what they're talking about than myself. As for the rest of the world, I'd imagine that East Asia and India isn't very fertile creationist ground, and I've got no clue how Islam treats the issue.
I'd imagine that if the world view is significantly different than the American view, that probably would affect Wikipedia's policy in some way. The way I look at the matter, is that Darwinism, Natural Selection, or whatever you want to call it ( Evolution, which I've been unfortunately using so far, is a gross misnomer ) is a scientific law. Plain and simple. What goes up, must come down. The sun rises in the east. E equals MC squared, and species diversify according to rules of competition, climatic changes, genetics, and other such things that are well known. Those very few biologists who are strict creationist set out in the field of biology with the express intent of disproving evolution, and still have no basis for the 7 days nonsense. As for the original amino acids and divinely inspired puddles of goo, I just personally don't care whether or not god or anyone else got involved. But that's just me. Seckstu
Hear, hear. Creationism is a crackpot theory and should be presented as such as long as no shred of evidence can be presented. --Pinkunicorn
The latter is entirely the wrong approach. Yes, creationism is a crackpot theory. No, it should not be presented as such, precisely because there are many people, some of them quite intelligent people who would like to make up their own minds for themselves, thank you very much, who disagree that it's a crackpot theory. It is not our job to convince the world of the truth. It is our job to present the facts about what the theory says, about what evidence there is (or is not) for the theory, about who promulgates it and their arguments and who opposes it and their arguments--and do all this in an unbiased fashion--and let people make up their own minds for themselves. If we do this, we will gain the respect of everyone, including the vast majority of those who think that creationism is a crackpot theory. --LMS
Moved this to /Talk 1 October 2001:
"[We need a way to sum up the situation that does not make it seem as though Wikipedia officially endorses evolutionary science, as the above does. (Whoever gets the last word seems the victor, eh?) Yes, that sounds ridiculous, but that's an illustration of lack of bias.]"
Don't know where this goes, since [James Ussher]? doesn't have a page yet.... does anyone know if he's the guy that argue that God, when he created the Earth & all its animals and plants, etc., also created fossils of animals that no longer existed--created them *as* fossils, which had never been actual alive animals? Anyone know what that school of thought was called?
You're thinking of Philip Henry Gosse, who wrote a book called Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie The Geological Knot that expounded this idea. It crashed and burned in such a firestorm of criticism from both scientists and biblical literalists that I don't think it ever gained a groovy name a la uniformitarianism or catastrophism. Gosse called it "prochronism", but I don't think that got into the language. It's generally referred to as "Omphalos" after the book, or sometimes "in situ creation" -- Paul Drye
Lots of potential observations would falsify evolution: for example, finding reverse-dated fossils (i.e., finding a fossil of a species dated older than the species from which it apparently descended); finding colorful sexual-selection markings on a species without vision (like blind fish and moles); finding a species so bizarre and different from all others that it has no plausible ancestor (say, finding one that doesn't use DNA/RNA); finding a species with a new complex major body organ or apparatus that is totally absent from its closest ancestors. That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but there are probably others. --LDC
I think the issue is more delicate than that: Darwinism is ultimately a probabilistic theory. Things that increase fitness are more likely to happen, but they don't have to happen, nor are things that decrease fitness impossible to happen. There are virtually no rules in biology without exception, there are just some things that are vastly more likely than others, and for good reasons. Not all species are well-adapted: in fact, all species die out after a short while, so observing a particularly mis-adapted species could just mean that it is in the last phase of its life cycle.
Supporting or falsifying probabilistic theories is a difficult matter. If I show you a die, and claim it is loaded, how can you test this hypothesis without cutting the die in pieces? You have to roll it repeatedly, but what counts as a falsification? Statisticians come up with criteria of course, but they are not as hard and fast as one would like, and they are difficult to apply to biology, because Darwinism is not advanced enough predict the answer to a question like "How likely is it that a species living exclusively in water would have lungs as opposed to gills". If Darwinism could compute a probability, then the statistician could attempt to check it against the evidence. Darwinism is a qualitative, not even a quantitative, probabilistic theory at this point, and it is truly tough to falsify those. --AxelBoldt
The mistake you're making here is assuming that evolution is one theory. It is not. It is literally thousands of theories, each one falsifiable. Formally, the set of such theories is known as the "evolutionary mechanism theories," or EMTs. You cannot falsify the set of EMTs all at once, but you can falsify any one of them. And, in fact, this happens all the time. The consequence is that either the theory is dropped as unsound, adjusted to become more sound, or evaluated in its interaction with other theories, and then perhaps several theories are modified.
The following was added to the main page, but is clearly commentary, so it belongs here. I think he's right that some mention should be made of the different schools of thought, including "intelligent design" (though it would be incorrect to call it a scientific hypothesis as he does, because it's clearly not falsifiable). ---LDC
Don't forget that there are two major kinds of Creationism: Sudden Creationism and Intelligent Design.
Sudden Creationism is the religious doctrine that God created everything in a very short period of time (one week) a relatively short time ago (six thousand years). What He created includes the artifacts known as fossils, which would in this view not comprise a 'record' of any sort.
Intelligent Design is the scientific hypotheses that evolution, i.e, the appearance of new species over time, really did happen. Its cause was not random genetic mutation but intervention by a divine force.
Sudden Creationism is not a scientific theory because it interprets the only evidence available (fossils) according to pre-conceived doctrine. Intelligent design is a viable hypothesis because it fits the facts rather than interpreting them away.
The difference between Intelligent Design and Darwinism is the change agent. While Darwinists regard God as not being involved in evolution (often because of His presumed non-existence), advocates of Intelligent Design regard God as being involved.
-- Ed Poor
Further, in the highly controversial aspect of the evolution of humanity itself, which is where the big hangup is in the minds of creationists, I added a blurb for creationism. I mean, what's the harm. See Homo sapiens, which itself needs some work. :) --[Chuck Kincy]?
If it wasn't discussion, it still didn't really fit into the article, and doesn't say anything that isn't already well covered here.
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