Fair enough, Ted. I'll try to pull a little more out of you while on the subject. Years ago I learned of abduction in my Philosophy of Biology class, a favorite. The philosopher Elliot Sober has an intriguing twist to the creationism debate. The design argument, traditionally understood as an argument from analogy, he says is better thought as an inference to the best explanation. In other words, at one time we knew of only one origin of things that looked designed: a designer. Darwin's theory, Sober argues, became the superior explanation because it could account for the appearance of life's design, as well as the sloppy parts of that design. I think this is a clever argument, even commendably persuasive (it reflects the humility of pragmatism: "who cares for Certainty, it seems to me..."). But it implies creationism was intellectually credible right up until Darwin - despite its inherantly nonsensicality. While the argument is based on observation (designs have designers), testability was out of the question until a theory like evolution turned up. This appeal to abduction strikes me as grossly non-Objectivist. It is to say, despite our explanation's problems, it's the best we have. Is abduction inferior to other types of reasoning? Is abduction alone justification for regarding something as true? Another question to add to the list above is if induction is the essence of concept formation, does abduction have a similar relation? Btw, Ted, your posts attacking gene selection in other threads were great. I wouldn't have understood their gravity without the class I mentioned above. That one of science's most popular writers still champions this (last I heard) is bothersome.