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Author
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Topic: On the Difficulty of Reconstructing Origins
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RBH
Member
Member # 380
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posted 18. December 2002 11:24
I was struck by this news story. For those not able to retrieve it, it tells of four current attempts to reconstruct the original airplane that the Wright brothers flew successfully at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Two quotations in particular struck me. quote:
In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright built and flew the first airplane and launched modern aviation, but nearly 100 years later modern aviation is still not sure how the two brothers did it.
and from the curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum quote:
The museum's airplane was rebuilt by Orville Wright in 1916 and again in 1928 and includes items that may not have been on the original 1903 airplane, said Tom Crouch, the museum's senior curator of aeronautics.
"What we have is the world's first airplane the way the inventor of the airplane wanted you to see it," said Crouch.
In other words, there are serious unresolved questions about the nature of an artifact that is just 100 years old. It is the precursor of a technological lineage of enormous importance and breadth, and we don't know with precision what it was like!
I'm not sure what to do with this, but it obviously has lessons for the issue of reconstructing the structures and processes at the origin of life and other historical phenomena in biology. The four reconstructions differ in some details, both minor and major, from the hypothesized original Wright Flyer. Even if one or more of the four reconstructions succeeds in flying as the Flyer was reported to have done, one wonders whether that will settle (to everyone's satisfaction) the lingering questions about what exactly it was that got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903.
The issue relevant to this board obviously has to do with the nature of the evidence that we depend on for reconstructing past events that leave fragmentary traces but not complete narratives embedded in the historical record. It is also about the epistemological force of inferences we make. What sort of evidence yields what sort of confidence in our inferences about those past events? When are we justified in saying, "We don't know exactly what happened, and we may never know with certainty, but based on the fragments of surviving evidence and on plausible reconstructions we have made, it could well have been of this nature."
RBH
[ 18. December 2002, 11:32: Message edited by: RBH ]
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Josh
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Member # 405
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posted 18. December 2002 14:52
quote:
When are we justified in saying, "We don't know exactly what happened, and we may never know with certainty, but based on the fragments of surviving evidence and on plausible reconstructions we have made, it could well have been of this nature."
I'll bite here. What justification are you looking for? If you want popular opinion, then debate tactics and voting will determine when you can feel justified. (For example, ID can feel justified now that Ohio has passed requirements for students to know of critiques of evolution in the curriculum. They might feel more justified if students were required to know the concept of IC, but they can still feel justified I guess.) I think most people feel justified with their own conclusions when they feel they have processed enough facts and information to synthesize a picture of truth most consistent with those facts. Since no human will ever be capable of synthesizing all data and facts for various reasons (and since some percentage of "facts" we know will probably be wrong in one way or another statistically,) we should be constantly aware of our limitations. I think folks like Richard Dawkins or Peter Atkins are quite unaware of their limitations, or being aware of them, don't consider at all that their limitations might open up the possibilities of what is and isn't true. They believe their viewpoint so strongly, that they don't feel that any belief whatsoever is required to come to their conclusions (and I think the same point can be said for ardent creationist folks like Duane Gish or Henry Morris, possibly even Jonathan Wells to varying degrees.) How do these folks feel justified in making their conclusions? Obviously they feel they know ENOUGH to determine the truth, and others don't know or interpret wrongly. Of course, another essential issue is what evidence you consider and what weight you give that evidence. If you give scientific inquiry zero weight and multiply that by the evidence you get zero, and if you give the bible 100% weight and multiply that by the evidence you get a very strong conclusion. And vice versa is true. I guess the follow up question is; how confident do you want to be about your reconstructions, and how open are you to the possibility of error in your position? Finally, considering platonic forms, presumably the perfect truth and nature of all things does in fact exist and all of this deals specifically with us humans being capable of knowing/percieving that truth. Only God, if there is such a thing, could be capable of such realization.
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Moderator
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Member # 1
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posted 19. December 2002 12:38
This thread is being shut down because it does not meet the standards of Brainstorms discussion.
RBH, your original post had potential. But you needed more positive content. Instead of vaguely gesturing at the Wright Brother's plane as an example of the difficulty of reconstructing a complex system from the past, provide your own idea of what insights we might get from this example. Give us a specific, postitive thesis instead of a vague, general one. Otherwise the thread has no real direction and will degenerate quickly.
Josh--talking about what people take as justification of their beliefs, or motivations, etc., are inappropriate to Brainstorms. Furthermore, the tone of your post was almost entirely negative, with very little positive insight.
The ideas on this thread could be developed in positive ways. But as is, I can see no reason to leave the thread open.
[ 19. December 2002, 14:53: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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