Discussion

If you want your statement about Retrodictive Science posted here then please email  philandrews@pre-historic.com and it will be posted here. 

Are there distinctions between predictive and retrodictive science? 

Yes, retrodictions use present data to infer past events.  The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (2024) defines retrodiction as: “The hypothesis that some event happened in the past, as opposed to the prediction that an event will happen in the future.” 

Jeffares (2008, 470) says: “The historical sciences seem to make retro-dictions— claims about the past... The historical sciences cannot directly confirm their hypotheses about the past with observations due to the lack of access to the past. They cannot confirm their hypotheses with contemporary observations because they are unique hypotheses about particular times or places. The result is a problem of confirmation. With no ability to observe their objects of enquiry, to repeat observations, or to intervene on processes, there is seemingly no way directly to confirm hypotheses. What I want to show in this paper is that this view of the historical sciences I have presented overlooks their reliance on regularities. Because the historical sciences do utilise regularities, even when investigating one off, singular events, they gain access to the confirmatory apparatus of the experimental sciences. They have the means to test hypotheses about the past... The historical sciences also seek regularities in the world, and have to do so in order to secure their claims about the past... The best way to understand the historical sciences is to see them deploying well understood regularities." 

Also, Cleland (2011, p 552) states: “Practices of the historical natural sciences do not seem to closely resemble those of stereotypical experimental science because historical natural science targets long-past, token events, upon which controlled experiments cannot be conducted." 

Interestingly, retrodictions of the pre-historic era cannot include experiments because experiments are evaluations of predictions about the future, therefore retrodictions of the pre-historic era only use the established regularities of nature (present data) to infer past events. 

Jeffares (2008, 472) says: “[retrodictive] theories make quite explicit claims; they effectively make predictions about what we should see in the record of the past.”

Cleland (2011, p 567) also comments that: “The basic idea behind narrative explanation is to construct a story—a coherent, intuitively continuous, causal sequence of events centering on a precipitating event and culminating in the phenomena (traces) in need of explanation” that we see in the world around us now.

Grim et al (2013, p 2369) say: “In cases in which simulation is used for retrodiction, it is the input conditions that are read for new information. If the output conditions correspond to the current state of the world, and if the simulation’s mechanism plausibly corresponds to ways in which we know the world to work, the input conditions indicate a possible previous state of the world.” 

Thus researchers should do 2 things:

1. Researchers should evaluate the internal consistency of retrodictive narratives by theoretically demonstrating how the chain of events conform to the established regularities of nature;  and 

2. Researchers should show that their narratives’ predictions concerning the present align with the world at present.

Employment of this feedback loop inductive triangulation  (Evans and Thébault (2020), Wylie (2020), Chapman and Wylie (2016), Grim et al (2013) method will fine-tune narratives and increase reliability. 

Narratives have not been required to demonstrate these strategies which means they could be unreliable.  As Odenwald (2022, p 23) says about his narrative of the origin of the universe: “Of course, this entire story is highly speculative, even fanciful.” 

This unreliability has been possible because retrodictive narratives have little bearing on the safety or quality of human life since retrodictions are not used in Engineering, Medicine etc. 

An official methodology will help increase incentive to produce reliable results like in predictive science.

(Note that when we have recent past observational data, we can use it to describe new regularities in nature like Kepler and the motion of the planets. This is also called retrodiction and thus our focus is on the scenario where unique pre-historic events are proposed, i.e. there have been no recorded observations of the events.)

The following quotes from scientists present anomalies that need further research...

“If none of us knew in advance that stars exist, frontline research would offer plenty of convincing reasons for why stars could never form.” [1]

“Cosmologists have another saying they like to cite: ‘You get to invoke the tooth fairy only once,’ meaning dark matter, ‘but now we have to invoke the tooth fairy twice,’ meaning dark energy.” [2]

“Most of us are persuaded that stars form out of more diffuse material which must, therefore, condense, contract, accrete etc. nevertheless, nearly all observations of pre-main-sequence and proto-stars are dominated by outflowing stuff.” [3]

“We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form.” [4]

“The origin of stars represents one of the most fundamental unsolved problems of contemporary astrophysics.” [5]

“Nearly a century after the true nature of galaxies was established, their origin and evolution remain great unsolved problems of modern astrophysics.” [6]

“The formation of galaxies and large scale structures remains ‘TMIUPIMA’… ‘The most important unsolved problem in modern astrophysics’…” [7]

“A completely satisfactory theory of galaxy formation remains to be formulated.” [8]

“Finally we may note that one difficulty common to all solar nebula theories concerns the rotation axis of the sun, which is at 7° to that of the system as a whole. It is not feasible that the rotation axis of the central body could be so inclined to that of the disk, or alternatively, that planets produced within the disk could systematically depart so much from its plane.” [9]

“The presence of such fully evolved galaxies so early in the life of the cosmos is hard to explain and has been a major puzzle to astronomers studying how galaxies form and evolve.” [10]

“We just simply don’t know the answer to the question ‘how did the universe begin?’. There are things that all cosmologists don’t know the answer to, many questions, that’s one of the main ones, how did the universe begin?” [11]

“Why a superflare has not occurred on the Sun in recorded history is unclear. ‘I think a consensus is emerging that our Sun is extraordinarily stable.’ suggests Galen Gisler” [12]

“Is there a self-consistent single-impact and disk evolution scenario that is consistent with the masses, angular momentum, lunar iron fraction, and isotope/volatile compositions of the Earth and Moon? ls the initial thermal state of the Moon consistent with its formation from an impact-generated disk?” [13]

“We are really amazed – these are the earliest, oldest galaxies found to date. Their existence was not predicted by theory… we’re detecting galaxies we never expected to find, having a wide range of properties we never expected to see.” [14]

“The discovery of such a complex and mature structure so early in the history of the universe is highly surprising. Indeed, until recently it would have been deemed impossible.” [15]

“We expected to find basically zero massive galaxies beyond about 9 billion years ago, because theoretical models predict that massive galaxies form last. Instead we found highly developed galaxies that just shouldn’t have been there, but are.” [16]

“The processes that led to the formation of the planetary bodies in the Solar system are still not fully understood.” [17]

“How the first stage of this process, primary accretion, works is a fundamental unsolved problem of planetary science.” [18]

“Growth of planets may occur through their gravitational accretion into large bodies. Just how that takes place is not understood.” [19]

“The formation of planetesimals, the kilometre-sized planetary precursors, is still a puzzling process.” [20]

“Because of its multiple close connections to important problems in both physics and astronomy, cosmic acceleration may be the most profound mystery in science. Its solution could shed light on or be central to unravelling other important puzzles, including the cause of cosmic inflation, the vacuum energy problem, supersymmetry and superstrings, neutrino mass, new gravitational physics, and even dark matter.” [21]

“The present generation of young physicists may envy those of us who had the excitement and delight of developing the standard model. This might be a mistake, just as it turned out that my generation would have been mistaken to envy the earlier heroes of quantum electrodynamics. Our newly minted experimentalists and theorists now have a chance to participate in making the next big step beyond the standard model. They may even be able to see their way clear to the very high energy scale where a final theory will be revealed.” [22]

“Many discussions of origins pursue a more ambitious target: they aim to explain the creation of the universe “from nothing”. The target is the true initial state, not just the boundary of applicability of the SM. The origins are supposedly then explained without positing an earlier phase of evolution; supposedly this can be achieved, for example, by treating the origin of the universe as a fluctuation away from a vacuum state. Yet obviously a vacuum state is not nothing: it exists in a spacetime, and has a variety of non-trivial properties. It is a mistake to take this explanation as somehow directly addressing the metaphysical question of why there is something rather than nothing.” [23]

“I would really really like to know how life started, it is something that we absolutely don’t know at the moment.” [24]

“We have almost no idea how life did originate.” [25]

“Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organised themselves into the first living cell.” [26]

“Hot acidic waters containing clay do not provide the right conditions for chemicals to assemble themselves into pioneer organisms.” [27]

“Some biologists marvel that there is any evolution at all, considering the possible pitfalls of change. The idea is that organisms are so complex that it is very hard to change one aspect without wrecking everything else.”[28]

“The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.” [29]

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” [30]

“Macroevolution posed a problem to Darwin because his principle of descent with modification predicts gradual transitions between small-scale adaptive changes in populations and these larger-scale phenomena, yet there is little evidence for such transitions in nature. Instead, the natural world is often characterized by gaps, or discontinuities. One type of gap relates to the existence of 'organs of extreme perfection', such as the eye, or morphological innovations, such as wings, both of which are found fully formed in present-day organisms without leaving evidence of how they evolved.” [31]

“Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the [im]mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence.” [32]

“All the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.” [33]

“While the new study links the evolution of flight to the ascension of insects, it raises new questions about how and why they evolved wings in the first place, said study co-author Kevin Boyce, an associate professor of geological sciences at Stanford Earth. ‘In the Devonian, there were only a few insects, all wingless,’ Boyce said. ‘But you come out the other side and we have flight. What happened in between? Good question.’.” [34]

“Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis.” [35]

“Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.” [36]

“Studies conducted since Darwin’s time have failed to produce a continuous series of fossils as predicted.”[37]

“The Cambrian strata of rocks, in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups, and we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.” [38]

“When flowering plants show up in the fossil record, they appear with a bang, with no obvious series of intermediates… The ancestor just is not there.” [39]

“Schweitzer was studying thin slices of bones from a T. rex. under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, ’I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.’ …maybe the textbooks were wrong about fossilization.” [40]

“They concluded that the arched back seen in so many fossils was the result of the expiring dinosaur’s final death throes and immersion in water.” [41]

References:

[1] Tyson, Neil Degrasse, Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 2007, p. 187.

[2] Panek, Richard, “Out There”, New York Times Magazine, 11 March 2007.

[3] Trimble, V., Aschwanden, M. J., “Astrophysics in 2000.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 113:1025-1114, September 2001.

[4] Frenk, C. as quoted in “Surveys Scour the Cosmic Deep.” Science 303:1750, 19 March 2004.

[5] Lada, Charles J., and Shu, Frank H., 4 May 1990. “The Formation of Sunlike Stars.” Science248:564.

[6] West, M.J., Cote, P., Marzke R.O., and Jordan, A. “Reconstructing Galaxy Histories from Globular Clusters.” Nature427:31-35, 1 January 2004.

[7] Trimble, V., Aschwanden, M. J., “Astrophysics in 2000.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 113:1025-1114, September 2001.

[8] Silk, J., The Big Bang,  New York: Henry Holt, 2000, p. 23.

[9] Dormand, John R., and Woolfson, M. M., The Origin of the Solar System: The Capture Theory, United Kingdom, E. Horwood, 1989, p. 48.

[10] “Old Galaxies Stick Together in the Young Universe”, Science Daily, 4 April 2008.

[11] Frenk, C., Royal Society Summer Science Online, filmed on 17 July 2020. (https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2020/summer-science-online/programme/friday/)

[12]Seife, C., “Thank our lucky star”, New Scientist 2168, 9 January 1999. (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16121682-600-thank-our-lucky-star/) 

[13]Barr, A. C., “On the Origin of Earth’s Moon”, J. Geophys. Res., 121, 1573-1601, doi:10.1002/2016JE005098.

[14] “Astronomical Surprise: Massive Old Galaxies Starve to Death in the Infant Universe”, Science Daily, 21 March 2005. www.sciencedaily.com

[15] ESO Press Release, “Surprise Discovery of Highly Developed Structure in the Young Universe.” 2 March 2005. www.eso.org

[16] Glazebrook, K. “Glimpse at Early Universe Reveals Surprising Mature Galaxies” Science Daily July 2004.

[17] Blum, J., “Evidence for the formation of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko through gravitational collapse of a bound clump of pebbles”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 469, Issue Suppl_2, July 2017, Pages S755–S773, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx2741, 25 October 2017.

[18] Cuzzi, J., “Planets: the first movement” Nature448 (30 Aug 2007) p. 1003.

[19] Harwit, M, Astrophysical Concepts, 2nd Ed., p. 553.

[20] Blum, J., Wurm, G., “The Growth Mechanisms of Macroscopic Bodies in Protoplanetary Disks” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 46: 21-56 (Sept 2008) p. 21.

[21]Turner, Michael. S., “Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe” The Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 3 June 2008. 46:385–432 (astro.annualreviews.org doi: 10.1146/annurev.astro.46.060407.145243)

[22]Weinberg, Steven, “Essay: Half a Century of the Standard Model”, Physical Review Letters 121, 220001 (2018), 27 November 2018. (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.220001)

[23] Smeenk, Christopher and George Ellis, "Philosophy of Cosmology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (26 Sep 2017), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/cosmology/)

[24] Dawkins, Richard., “Life, The Universe, And Everything”, filmed on 17 April 2015 at the Academia Film Olomouc Science Film Festival, Czech Republic. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGHUZ3ncz5A)

[25] Davies, Paul., Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning, edited by John D. Barrow, et al., Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 107.

[26] Davies, Paul., “Was life on Earth born lucky?” New Scientist, 12 July 2003. (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17924034-700-was-life-on-earth-born-lucky/)

[27]Morelle, R., “Darwin’s warm pond idea is tested” BBC News, 13 February 2006. (news.bbc.co.uk) 

[28]Dicks, L., “The creatures time forgot”, New Scientist 164(2209):39, 1999.

[29] Dawkins, Richard., A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003, p. 79.

[30] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 5th Edition, 1869 p. 169.

[31] Reznick, D. N., Ricklefs, E., “Darwin's bridge between microevolution and macroevolution”, Nature, 457(7231):837, 12 February 2009.

[32] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 5th Edition, 1869 p. 419.

[33] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 5th Edition, 1869 p. 420.

[34]Than, K., “Insects took off when they evolved wings Stanford researchers find”, Stanford News, 23 January 2018 (https://news.stanford.edu/2018/01/23/insects-took-off-evolved-wings/).

[35] Denton, M., Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis,Discovery Institute Press, 2016.

[36] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 5th Edition, 1869 p. 246.

[37]Hickman, C., Animal Diversity, McGraw Hill, New York, p. 123, 2008.

[38] Dawkins, Richard., The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence Reveals a Universe Without Design, New York, Norton, 1987, p. 229.

[39] Pennisi, E., “On the origin of flowering plants”, Science324(5923):28,30, 3 April 2009.

[40] Schweitzer, M. as quoted in “Dinosaur shocker”, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2006.

[41] Switek, B., “Watery secret of the dinosaur death pose”, New Scientist, 23 November 2011. (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21207-watery-secret-of-the-dinosaur-death-pose/)