Yeah I read that already, but what I said doesn't necessarily imply creationism. What arguments do you have to show that everything we see today came about SOLELY through mutation and natural selection?
It's the true form (generalization) of the old "new proposals require evidence" catchall. The space of possible ways things could happen and be in accordance with our ignorance is enormous. If you want the best chances of being right, you keep you guesses maximally simple!
If you create a more complex model that includes more factors than mutation and natural selection and it is able to predict reality better than one that only includes those factors then you win. As it turns out, people have by using more complete understanding of the actual mechanics of human genetics, but a rough and basically accurate picture can be painted without invoking those mechanisms.
That "mostly accurate" picture is where most people stop when they argue "for evolution". It's a fantastic rule of thumb.
What makes it fantastic, though? What is the hypothesis / theory exactly that they are espousing, when they talk about evolutionary psychology for example?
Isn't it the fact that our behaviors all have an evolutionary basis, including e.g. the desire for a human male to sleep after sex? Each of these gets its specially concocted rendition of the narrator's fantasy -- e.g. "so that the women could get away more often after copulating".
I find this to be completely unscientific and wonder what falsifiable predictions these theories make. I mean the ones that imply that everything can be explained simply in terms of "evolution" by mutation and natural selection.
Nobody ever claims that evolution explains everything. The claim is something closer to "Of all theories of equivalent or lesser complexity as evolution, no other one yet discovered has better predictive power".
I'm not sure of my scientific history here, but I believe one extraordinary falsifiable prediction drawn from evolution in its earlier days is that there should be some common structure of generational information between almost all living things, a prediction which the discovery of DNA clearly validated.
Unless you have some truly spectacular competing theory, with plenty of hard evidence to back it up, there is only one conceivable reason for your attempted nitpicks at evolutionary biology and that is religious conviction. I'm pretty sure you don't have the former, so changing away from this very repetitive channel..
I don't know why you'd think religion is the only conceivable reason. I think both religious people and others start to see enemies where there aren't any (I guess it's an evolutionary psychology instinct, right? Because the human brain evolved to find tigers better, at the expense of false positives, etc.)
To be honest I didn't remember a lot of my gripes off the bat when I wrote it, but a big one is the gratuitous use of evolutionary psychology by all armchair theorists and their book writing moms these days. How is that religious? They take any sort of human behavior and start speculating evolutionary reasons for it purely in terms of reproductive fitness, because in essence they are saying it all boils down to mutation and natural selection + it must be super simple. WHY?
Science doesn't work this way. "Unless you have some truly spectacular competing theory, I'm just gonna use empty speculation to explain why people have non-advantageous trait X, because we know that mutation and natural selection take place". It works by making falsifiable predictions. What falsifiable predictions do armchair speculators about tiny human behavior make? Do they test them?
Here is one that I remember was posted by a friend of mine on facebook. Note the empty speculation at the end. Really, narrator? Just because you have a British accent we should implicitly accept that assertion?
This is a shortsighted and reactionary post: DH1 or DH2 at best [1]. I understand your frustration, but if you only have frustration to contribute then HN prefers silence. It's the path to maintaining a respectful community.
It turns out, unsurprisingly, that all human phenotypes cannot be explained by naïve evolutionary biology but instead require more genetics and biochemistry to describe. Consider the specifics of eye color: evolution does not specify this feature, so a theory which goes above evolution (not contrary to what EGreg is asking for) is necessary to predict this phenotype. We're just more complicated than that.
This is a rebuttal to using pure evolution to model the shape of human physiology that doesn't introduce religion.
