No, but the people who believed in the Greek deities also typically believed those deities were heavily invested in immediate mortal conflicts and highly sensitive to slights. Those Greeks would have expected some protection for the bird or retaliation against Meshullam. Seeing none would provide evidence that the bird was not a favorite of any of their deities.
"Each question will at least be held at 2 to 1 odds amongst professional philosophers, i.e., if more than 2/3s of professional philosophers agree, we won't bother. So as to not waste our time with small fish."
This is cheating, of course. You are comparing group A to group B on questions specifically selected for their difficulty to group B. Instead, it would be more fair to find open problems in fields that haven't received much attention from professional academic philosophers.
The person need not even be self-serving. All people respond to incentives, and since publishing popular results is rewarding (in fame; often financially as well) the creators of novel arguments will become more likely to believe those arguments.
Nietzsche can't know what the Superman will look like - nobody can. But he provides a great deal of assistance: he is extremely insightful about what people are doing today (well, late 1800s, but still applicable), how that tricks us into behaving and believing in certain ways, and what that means.
But he wrote these insights as poetry. If you wanted an argument spelled out logically or a methodology of scientific inquiry, you picked the wrong philosopher.
The first two are excellent examples. Thanks!
If Buller is to be believed that's another postdiction. The sort of studies I want to see would compare two groups who aren't known to be distinct. An example:
Group A and B evolved in different environments and should display some difference in behavior. They have different rates of intron fragments G and H Now look at apparently-homogenous group X, who do not believe they have A or B ancestry. Compare X with intron G to X with intron H and find the predicted behavior difference.
Do we have studies at that level?
Buller claims that the statistics come from police reports and that the police had previously been trained to look for stepparents as a source of child abuse. If so, 1 this was well known by nonpsychologists and 2 the magnitude of the effect may be overstated. Is there a problem with this critique?
Ok, update my cache: you listed 7 bold postdictions; please list some bold predictions.
Its true that not all science is prospective, but you need to at least avoid looking at the data when making hypotheses you will then test against that data. Often we divide a data set to do this. Its much easier to do this with quantitative hypotheses than qualitative ones.
It is cheating to make predictions that are actually postdictions. To test hypotheses we have to look at questions for which we don't have information and then test those questions by gathering new information. A lot of the "evolutionary psychology" are really "Just So" stories without this kind of hypothesis testing.
There is enough food for all starving human children. The existence of starving children has much more to do with corruption than with production.