Question for evolution supporters: what exactly counts as observed versus inferred?
I see this conversation get derailed constantly, so I wanted to give it a shot here. Super interested in your takes!
I personally believe God created the universe and the world we live in. But, that being said, I am definitely not a young-earth creationist. I accept that dinosaurs existed, I accept deep time, and I accept that biological populations change over generations. I also accept that microevolution is directly observable.
My question is about epistemology, because I think I’ve noticed a trend in these threads, so I thought this might be an interesting exercise.
When people say macroevolution has been observed, what exactly do you mean by observed?
Do you mean that we have directly observed biological change within living populations?
That we have observed speciation or reproductive isolation?
That we observe fossils, genetic similarities, anatomical similarities, and biogeographic patterns?
That we infer large-scale common descent from those lines of evidence?
Or that we infer unguided natural mechanisms are sufficient to explain the whole historical sequence?
Obviously, those are all related claims, of course, but they do not all seem to have the same evidential status, and I assume most of you would say the same, I would hope lol.
Here’s an example, although I’m no expert at this, so please bear with me:
- Observing bacteria adapt in a lab is direct observation of a living process.
- Observing fossils in rock is direct observation of evidence.
- Reconstructing a lineage from fossils is historical inference.
BUT:
- Saying this supports common ancestry takes you beyond the raw evidence and into a larger reconstruction of life’s history.
- Saying it proves a fully naturalistic account of life’s history is an even bigger step to try and take.
So here, I’ll add on to the question:
Where exactly do you guys draw the line between direct observation, historical inference, and philosophical interpretation?
And when you guys say macroevolution is observed, are you using observed to mean we directly watched the process happen, or we observe evidence from which the process is inferred?
Please skip the crocoduck stuff. I’m pretty openly not asking why a dog never gives birth to a cat, or why an ape never gives birth to a human. I think those types of conversations are a bit brain-rotty.
Some more questions for you guys:
What is directly observed?
What is inferred?
What would count against the inference?
And how do you avoid sliding from the idea that microevolution is observable to therefore the entire large-scale naturalistic evolutionary narrative has the same evidential status?