I've been thinking recently that I believe in the Theory of Evolution on about the same level as in the Theory of Plate Tectonics. I have grown up being taught that both are true, and I am capable of doing research in either field, or at least reading the literature to examine them for myself. I have not done so in either case, to any reasonable extent.
I am not swayed by the fact that some people consider the former (and not so much the latter) to be controversial, primarily because those people aren't scientists. I tend to be self-congratulatory about this fact, but then I think that I am essentially not interested in examining the evidence, but I am essentially taking it on faith (which the creationists are quick to point out). I think I have good Bayesian reasons to take science on faith (rather than, say, mythology that is being offered in its stead), but do I therefore have good reasons to accept a particular well-established scientific theory on faith, or is it incumbent upon me to examine it, if I think its conclusions are important to my life?
In other words, is it epistemologically wrong to rely on an authority that has produced a number of correct statements (that I could and did verify) to be more or less correct in the future? If I think of this problem as a sort of belief network, with a parent node that has causal connections to hundreds of children, I think such a reliance is reasonable, once you establish that the authority is indeed accurate. On the other hand, appeal to authority is probably the most famous fallacy there is.
Any thoughts? If Eliezer or other people have written on this exact topic, a reference would be appreciated.
We should expect some amount of evolution by natural selection 'a priori', from various obvious premises such as
(1) There is a reproduction process in which characteristics are inherited (2) Things with X characteristics in Y environment die/live etc.
There seems to be an absence of similarly parsimonious explanations, and the account given by natural selection is compelling. I suspect that even a small amount of knowledge of the empirical evidence for natural selection would establish a lower bound on the share of evolution it causes, such that searching for equally significant factors for evolution of life in general should be expected to fail.
If one set up a mathematical representation of a population that took into account characteristics, life, and death, etc. then natural selection would be the name for a provable behaviour of the system, even if the system were just axiomatised by more basic facts such as (1) and (2). I'm not convinced that the same is true of Aristotelian physics.
I struggle far more to fabricate accounts of our observations without natural selection than I did to get to grips with Newtonian mechanics. As in, accounts that don't leave me more confused (e.g. 'God did it', which is a mysterious non-answer).
Quantum mechanics I do not know well enough (and I'm not sure anyone does) at the level where mathematical reductionism meets theoretical physics, but I would not be surprised if it turned out to be extremely parsimonious given even a small number of our empirical observations.
Heliocentrism also seems much more contingent than natural selection, although possibly less than one thinks, given how prevalent star-planet systems are.
This merely says that the surviving characteristics will move towards optimal in an unspecified range, assuming there are no other significant influences.
It is not explained how exactly the things with less likely characteristics have appeared in the first place. Is there perhaps another process that causes non-optimality? How could you know the process is not actually stronger than the process of natural selection?
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