Comment by facepalm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by facepalm | Hacker News Reader

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Just because many people make up evolutionary just so stories doesn't mean that there can not also be valid evolutionary explanations.

If you just say "anorectal angle evolved so that people poop squatting" it is a just so story. To make it solid you have to show the context, history and so on. For example, why is it an advantage to be able to hold your poop in?

A lot of things evolved out of serendipity and are not perfect, like those arteries going up and down the whole long neck of giraffes to bridge a short distance. But there are evolutionary explanations for it.

As for features related to survival: I think phases with more and less pressure alternate. If you made a breakthrough, say you discovered skeletons, or invented the iPhone, for a while you may have such a big advantage that you can play around with lots of fancy variants. Eventually the rest of the world catches up, pressure gets higher and the less efficient variants get weeded out.

Just having plausible-sounding evolutionary explanations isn't enough, though. You also need a way to falsify the theory. There is a good essay about this called Science as Falsification, by Karl Popper:

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.htm...

Otherwise how is it different from Marxism or Freud's theories? I can always concoct an explanation in the context of my theory. That isn't science by itself. It's demagoguery.

You make a model, then you make predictions. If they fail, your model was wrong. You can do that in evolution theory, even though you are mostly looking at history. Maybe you predict that all birds should have tails at least 30'' long, then you look around and see that they don't. You can also look at the way genes spread - I suppose you can compare the observed spread of a gene to the spread that would be expected if it were random.

Nevertheless, once you see something unexplained (like zebra stripe), I suppose you start with creating theories, then you try to verify them. Isn't the article here doing exactly that?

Yes and if the a particular theory of evolution were only 5 years old that would be fine. But several classical formulations like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolutionary_synthesi... have been around for decades and various proponents around the world yell that they are "as proven as gravity". A strange position to take when there was little falsification. Your examples above serve to illustrate the point - they are just illustrations of how falsification might look like if it were done. If the prediction and falsification framework was robust by now, you wouldn't have to come up with made-up examples, there would have been tons of them like there are for other, widely tested theories, even in biology

I am not a biologist, so you shouldn't draw any conclusions from me not knowing good examples or the state of verification.

Your Wikipedia link seems to mention evidence for the "modern evolutionary synthesis", are you sure that there has been no falsification? Also, I have heard that name for the first time today.

Isn't most of 'anthropology' just invention of plausible sounding stories with no way to verify or falsify ever as well?

If you mean to say that society is a construct, well, yes. You learn that in the 101 course.

That does not lead to a "this is bullshit" conclusion, unfortunately, because we act on the stories we tell ourselves.

There are different levels of "construct" though. There are historical documents from the middle ages, from Rome, from ancient Egypt, etc. that can be checked to a certain degree. And there are stories that are just made out of thin air about how humans supposedly lived 50k years ago. This is not all the same.

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