"Sunil"  wrote in message
>
> Lately, I read in a book titled "Informal logic" in which the authors
> quotes that some people in evolution camp are using "begging
> question".
>
Most evolutionists are empirical scientists and have no training in formal
logic nor in philosophy. It is not surprising if there are technical
weaknesses in many of their arguments.
This doesn't mean that no professional philosophers also believe in
evolution.
>
> For example, they classify things based on the premiss to be proved;
> and predictions based on these classifications are used for
> argumentation. Tha author of the Informal logic, Walton, has given the
> newly founded society within evolutionary camp to avoid this kinda
> taxonomy.
>
Linnaeus, who invented binomial classification, lived before Darwin.
However, yes, there is an element of circularity in most of science. Ideally
the process is observation, hypothesis, experiment, result, conclusion, but
in practise the experiments are often difficult to perform and cannot be
fitted into the sequence on demand.
In evolution, it is not easy to devise repeatable experiments. We cannot go
back in a time machine to bring back dinosaur samples. However we can show
that dinosaur fossils, found by chance, all fit into strata that the
geologists regard as being over 70 million years old. Of course, the
geologists are partly using the fossils to date the rocks, hence some
circularity.
However "circularity" doesn't mean "any conclusion could
have been drawn".
For instance, if fossils were randomly distributed through rock strata, then
geologists wouldn't be able to build up a picture of rock dates from fossils
at all, and biologists would probably conclude that species come and go
rather than developing and eventually going extinct.
Finally, fossils are only one method geologists use to date rocks.
Radioactive isotope levels and other techniques are also used. Science forms
a series of overlapping models with a reasonable degree of mutual
consistency.
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