That’s why the theory of evolution only explains observations. It does not predict outcomes other than change - which is inevitable, even to a set of inanimate objects, let alone populations of imperfect self replicators.
Sure it does. As Haldane famously pointed out, it predicts that if you go fossil hunting in Precambrian rock, the outcome will not be you finding a fossil rabbit.
Oh, come on! Point out the place in Newton's Principia where he says "Take a Riemannian manifold and set the curvature to zero." The old theory falling out of the new theory as a first approximation to it is something that can only be discovered retrospectively.I didn’t see anywhere on that page a description like “take a globe earth and set the curvature to zero”.
The conception that 4D spacetime was flat wasn't anything like what we now call a physics theory. Newton adopted it implicitly because non-Euclidian geometry was unknown in his time. As soon as anyone actually started thinking about the quantifiable, observable consequences of any spacetime geometry model, Newtonian space and time were thrown out. Newton assumed Euclidean geometry because no alternative occurred to him. Iron Age sailors assumed the sea followed the familiar land-based Iron Age surveyors' geometry that Euclid would later formalize for their first five hundred years of Iron Age sailing because no alternative occurred to them.
If Eratosthenes' theory didn't reduce to internal angles of a triangle adding to two right angles and parallel lines not meeting in the surveyors' regime, he would have assumed the spherical earth was wrong.
Of course there was. What, you think Galileo invented physics? Why do you think we even call it physics? It's because Aristotle called it physics when he wrote eight books about it. And in Aristotle's day the flat earth model was still widely accepted by many educated Greeks -- the case for a round earth was still being made.
That is not a point in the Ptolemaic theory's favor. It could have assumed orbits were square and gotten actual quantifiable predictions that were reasonably accurate once it added enough variables.
Yes, finally!
Well said.
but as you have pointed out in all of your responses to me, there have been quite a number of times we have had to revise our “truth” in the face of new observables fit by new models.
Not at all; but don't take that as endorsing you guys' apparent instrumentalist conflation of right with accurate and useful. I use plain common-usage English, not some weird philosopherese. To say a theory is wrong is to say it says something that's false. For a theory to be truly right, therefore, it merely needs to not say any false things, to say some true things, and to not say anything that's not-even-wrong. A theory-of-everything is utterly unnecessary for this -- a theory can achieve true rightness simply by the expedient of remaining silent about anything it doesn't know. True rightness is a relatively easy thing for a theory to achieve as long as it's modest about making claims. But that's a tricky thing to achieve in physics because describing the whole universe is the project of physics, so truly right theories are mostly found in other sciences. Elephants and mice share a common ancestor -- that's a truly right theory. New York used to be covered by glaciers -- that's a truly right theory. (And yes, I know some people insist a "theory" has to be a lot more general than that. Who cares? We're analyzing "right" and "wrong" here, not "theory".)
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That’s not an evolutionary outcome. Sorry I was imprecise.
Upon further consideration, there are ways in which B2 is right, but it takes a synthesis of different fields.
Not so.
That’s a fluid value, entirely dependent upon the fitness landscape. No telling what “fitness” is going to look like tomorrow.
