January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, Dave, and thank you for your welcome on “My Talk”.

“This section was started with discussion of "bias in favor of Darwin's theory" raising the issue of misrepresentation of Darwin by anti-evolutionists, and as discussed above, we have to give due weight to the overwhelming scientific majority view on the basic subject of evolution.”

I certainly agree with that. 

But on the issue of using “realised”, I just have a couple of things to say. But as a preamble, if you like, I want to make the distinction between a theory and the reality that scientists etc test it against (I’m not being insulting, I assume everyone knows this already, but I’m making a case). Scientists don’t “prove” theories are true. But by conducting experiments they falsify the “bad” theories (again I assume you know this and obviously this is in agreement with the philosophy of Karl Popper).

Now,  I think it’s bad practice to state things in such a way that a theory sounds like it’s the “truth” (meaning in perfect agreement with reality) because it destroys this distinction (between theory, or scientific fact, and reality or truth. To say that “X realised that Y”, where Y is a theory, is suggesting that Y is “in perfect agreement with reality”. Now, I think the statement “all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors” does correspond perfectly with reality, but I also think we need to remember that it is still a theory (nothing is proven, remember, according to Popper) consistent with the general scientific method and perspective I already briefly outlined. Of course, in the case of evolution, someone arguing like this sounds rather silly  - it sounds like you’re being pedantic bordering on obsessive. Of course not all theories are the same - Popper would argue that theories that have “survived” criticism and rigorous testing are more “corroborated” (but never fully verified). But even if you wanted to make some exceptions, like the statement “all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors”, for the sake of scientific consistency, I think we should refrain from using “realised” in this context (incidentally, in regards to making exceptions, I certainly wouldn’t make any exceptions in respect to the sources given by David Wilson - these seem to me to be much more egregious cases of the word “realised”).

Anyway, so much for theory. As far as concrete help is concerned, have you thought about deleting “who realised that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors” altogether?  You probably know more about the history of evolution than I do, but I thought that this idea didn’t actually come from Darwin (I could be wrong, of course). But if it does, what about “Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who first proposed the fact that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and also the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection” or some variation on this?
Kind Regards, M.   01:05, 21