Asymmetrical Information

I thought they'd been explained a long time ago.

Babies hiccup before they're born; it's a way to exercise the diaphragm muscle so that they are ready to breath.

I think that's an example of the cure being worse than the disease... :)

Why isn't anybody laughing? A creationist saying something similar would be crucified! The evidence supporting this theory is highly speculative theory at best. Where's Karl Popper's principle of falsiability when it's so desperately needed? The next thing you know some nut ball is going to be talking about a whale swallowing a guy named Jonah, and another dude putting a bunch of animals on an ark. Where will this nonsense stop?

Not everything in science can be falsified, you know.

The last two paragraphs of the story address the issue of potential falsification, although in no great detail. It's not clear to me where David's objection originates.

I think David is grotesquely over-reacting (never a good idea to accidentally sugar your coffee from the crack bowl). Notably, the researchers (as Troy indicated) are appropriately careful to denote that their speculations are, lo and behold, speculative. Buried somewhere in David's outburst, though, may be a legitimate point: A creationist trying to speculate this way, even with the appropriate cautionary statements in place, would probably be hung -- and very quickly.

For whatever it may (or may not) be worth.

SDB: That thesis was acknowledged in the text, but as best as I understood the article, it is proposing an explanation by which the trait was preserved from an evolutionary lineage.

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