Hugh Miller thought that his call for design, purpose, and goal-directedness in nature could be grounded in empirical science. He chastised Chambers for having drawn speculative conclusions that far transcended the empirical, i.e., observational basis. Chambers, in contrast, found regularity in nature expressed in the three-fold parallelism of the Great Chain of Being, embryonic development, and the Fossil Record, which he explained with his Law of Development. Darwin recognized the incompleteness of, and the consequent weakness of Chambers’ system, and set out to ‘connect the facts’, to weave together all possible lines of evidence in support of his Law of Natural Selection. The astronomer Herschel belittled Darwin’s theory as the “law of the higgledy-piggledy”. Today, we hear calls for ‘Creation Science’, and ‘Intelligent Design’ is propagated as scientific, not by evolutionary biologists, but by scientists nevertheless. So what is science and what isn’t?
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Notes
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Rieppel, O. (2011). Respectable Science: What Is It?. In: Evolutionary Theory and the Creation Controversy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14896-5_7
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