I must say I am quite impressed by the uncovering through reading The Structure of Evolutionary Theory of the way that Darwin has treated historical and fossil research. In a sense Darwin uses a technique very similar to the way that Astronomers use in order to uncover the history and evolution of stars. Since the lifetime of a star is incredibly larger than the time scale of a human life astronomers use ’snapshots’ of stars that are currently available, which they know that have the same age (globular clusters), and draw their differences in evolution depending on their mass and luminocity thus plotting the famous Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
Darwin understands the massive gaps in historical evidence and fossils and uses the present state of organisms around various parts of the world in order to plot a snapshot of evolution, as an aid in the Evolutionary theory argument.
The abstraction involved in this is rather amazing.
(page 106)
This is one of the most amazing intellectual conquers by Charles Darwin. He creates a rather new methodological tool. It’s very difficult, almost impossible, to find prroofs off evolution at macroscopical scale, but he generates the conceptual tools to do so without the material evidence, but whit the whole probatorry value. I’m afraid this is one of the main criticism made by the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM frrom now on).
By: alfredo arizmendi on Αυγούστου 11, 2007
at 1:13 μμ