Reply to comment

After reading the first four-ish chapters, I'm looking for a way to see how by discovering and believing in evolution, we are getting it less wrong, as opposed to the more widely accepted concept of finding the perfectly correct answer.  Through the first three chapters, I was having a hard time finding support fot the "less wrong" concept.  There were allusions to the concept such as on page 13, "such inferences subsequently must be tested again and again against new observations, and the original inference is either falsified or considerably strengthened when confirmed by all of these tests."  Most references to the scientific method, skirted on the line between the loopy and the linear that we discussed in class.  I was expecting to find in the reading one or the other, but wasn't able to. 

However, when I reached chapter four, I began to cosider the beliefs that came before Darwin and his revolutionary theories.  Here was Darwin, a brilliant scientist who found a summary of observations that proved the old summary incorrect.  Meanwhile, the creationist believers refused to accept this new, maybe not correct, but certainly less wrong, conclusions.  After the lectures on Tuesday and Thursday, I found myself looking at them, not as crazed religious believers, but rather as bad scientists.  Whether or not this is a worse label, I have no idea.  These anti-Darwinians refuse to accept this less wrong conclusion.  Perhaps the reason for this, in part, is due to the fear of being wrong.  As Prof. Grobstein said in class, good scientists want to prove the existing theories wrong, not defend them.  In the story of Darwin, I feel that we can find the two polar examples of the intro lecture from class.