(January 22, 2015 at 11:47 pm)Godschild Wrote: Others died in different ways, but none of the good people left got seriously sick or died until after most of this group was punished.There are two things implied by your story: one, that it was possible to identify who was "good" and who was "bad." Two, that at least some of the "good" people suffered illness and death before all of the "bad" people did.
Wouldn't it have been more convincing if everyone who stayed got sick, or if only the "bad" ones did while the "good" ones got the urge to join you? Otherwise it doesn't seem like something done according to plan as much as it is just a combination of coincidence and selection bias.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
