Richard Dawkins often used murder scene analogy...

[Just_me_Mike]

Simple question. But before I ask it, for those not familiar with this analogy, Dawkins says the certainty about evolution is similar to a detective not having to have witnessed a murder in order to know that it was a murder and perhaps much more than just that. Of course, this is because much evidence points more and more to a small number of conclusions.

So, as we know that DNA testing has done wonders and even got prisoners out of prison, because of faulty detective work, or crime scene investigation.

Does anyone want to comment how the failure of good detective work can sometimes be 100% wrong, and if not 100% wrong, wrong enough to free a prisoner of the crime.

Is it remotely possible that evolution is true, but not true in the way Dawkins or Darwin suggested. In other words, they have the crime scene to investigate, and they have all the evidence, but have come to the wrong conclusion (sentenced the wrong guy so to speak)

Just curious as to the type of responses I might get.

 

[outhouse]

Simple question. But before I ask it, for those not familiar with this analogy, Dawkins says the certainty about evolution is similar to a detective not having to have witnessed a murder in order to know that it was a murder and perhaps much more than just that. Of course, this is because much evidence points more and more to a small number of conclusions.

So, as we know that DNA testing has done wonders and even got prisoners out of prison, because of faulty detective work, or crime scene investigation.

Does anyone want to comment how the failure of good detective work can sometimes be 100% wrong, and if not 100% wrong, wrong enough to free a prisoner of the crime.

Is it remotely possible that evolution is true, but not true in the way Dawkins or Darwin suggested. In other words, they have the crime scene to investigate, and they have all the evidence, but have come to the wrong conclusion (sentenced the wrong guy so to speak)

Just curious as to the type of responses I might get.

his work is based on facts others have found. In his case he knows and has solid evidence of the criminals guilt.

people can make mistakes, but when you have a eye witness to the crime mistakes are far and few between

when a group of people over a hundred years see the same crime committed by the same criminal there is no doubt at all about said guilty verdict

 

[Jose Fly]

So, as we know that DNA testing has done wonders and even got prisoners out of prison, because of faulty detective work, or crime scene investigation.

Does anyone want to comment how the failure of good detective work can sometimes be 100% wrong, and if not 100% wrong, wrong enough to free a prisoner of the crime.

If you can show where Dawkins took the analogy to the point of saying that therefore, evolutionary biology is 100% correct all the time, you'll have made a valid point. If not, you're taking a simple illustrative analogy beyond its intent.

Is it remotely possible that evolution is true, but not true in the way Dawkins or Darwin suggested. In other words, they have the crime scene to investigate, and they have all the evidence, but have come to the wrong conclusion (sentenced the wrong guy so to speak)

Of course it is. If it weren't, there wouldn't be a field of science called "evolutionary biology"; we would have already figured everything out.

 

[Just_me_Mike]

Thanks for the replies...
Before Darwins came along, what was evolution? I mean was there already hot pursuits to document this way of looking at the world, or do we largely credit Darwins with this?

 

[Gunfingers]

Lamarck proposed an evolutionary hypothesis before Darwin did, but Darwin got most of the concepts right, such as natural selection and universal common ancestry, where Lamarck thought that evolution occured as an immediate response to a need in the population (e.g. birds start living by water so they start developing webbing on their feet so they can swim) and that there were multiple original ancestors, one for each major population.

 

[painted wolf]

Simple question. But before I ask it, for those not familiar with this analogy, Dawkins says the certainty about evolution is similar to a detective not having to have witnessed a murder in order to know that it was a murder and perhaps much more than just that. Of course, this is because much evidence points more and more to a small number of conclusions.

So, as we know that DNA testing has done wonders and even got prisoners out of prison, because of faulty detective work, or crime scene investigation.

Does anyone want to comment how the failure of good detective work can sometimes be 100% wrong, and if not 100% wrong, wrong enough to free a prisoner of the crime.

What is key here is that good detective work is almost never 100% wrong, there is usually a murder for example. While they may have the wrong suspect, they have the right crime (which was the point of the analogy was it not?).
Second, the introduction of DNA evidence shows that good detective work has only gotten better with time and technology... the chances of making a mistake if everything is done properly are much slimmer.

Is it remotely possible that evolution is true, but not true in the way Dawkins or Darwin suggested. In other words, they have the crime scene to investigate, and they have all the evidence, but have come to the wrong conclusion (sentenced the wrong guy so to speak)

Just curious as to the type of responses I might get.

Absolutely... Darwin's view of evolution has been shown to be wrong in a few places... he didn't know about DNA or Mendelian genetics for example.
The key here isn't that they came to a wrong conclusion because they looked at "all the evidence wrong" but because they simply didn't have "all the evidence".

The more evidence we find the more precise our view becomes.... and it has only gotten better over the past 150 odd years. Heck, the advances we have made in the past 50 years are mind boggling.

Is there room for another major addition to our understanding? Absolutely, that is one of the joys of science, it is always prepared to accept new evidence and refine it's position.

wa:do

 

[Pegg]

Does anyone want to comment how the failure of good detective work can sometimes be 100% wrong, and if not 100% wrong, wrong enough to free a prisoner of the crime.

OJ Simpson.

 

[David M]

Is it remotely possible that evolution is true, but not true in the way Dawkins or Darwin suggested. In other words, they have the crime scene to investigate, and they have all the evidence, but have come to the wrong conclusion (sentenced the wrong guy so to speak)

Just curious as to the type of responses I might get.

Not really even remotely possible, because the conclusion that evolution is "true" comes not from 1 crime scene but from millions. And they all say the same thing.

Darwin did completely miss some things, for instance although he proposed that there was a means of heredity in living things that allowed variation he knew nothing about DNA so the mechanism he put forward in that area was not correct.