Platt:
First, nevertheless, one should clearly specify what we believe the contents of
"the theory of evolution" to be (I've seen a few differences implicit in the
previous messages of this thread). Is the content of the theory: "life on Earth
has evolved so and so, first we had fish, then amphibians, then birds, because
of genetic mutations and natural selection..."; or is it: "life can evolve due
to random genetic mutations and natural selection?" or perhaps "life *has*
evolved due to.."
All variants have problems with respect to falsification. In a sense, the first
one is the one who gets Popper's "scientific" status more easily. In fact, if we
found a human fossil from the Jurassic, or earlier, a relevant part of the
evolutionist building would fall down. The second looks down by law: "can" is
something that cannot be falsified. Nevertheless, the theory so expressed is
almost a tautology *unless* you decide that genetic mutations can't happen; and
"genetic mutations can happen" is a perfectly OK scientific statement. The third
variant is probably what Popper had problems with. In fact, that life has
evolved cannot be falsified (only confirmed); and much less can the "reason
whys" of this evolution. As someone pointed out, many more theories about the
"past" (or the "far away", for that matter) suffer from the same problems.
One thing to note, however, is that *no* theory about the past and reasons why
of the past can ever be falsified; so either we decide that we will have no
scientific theory on the origin of life, or leave Popper's principles behind for
these special cases. I think the latter was chosen and, since the past is gone,
we stick to another set of reasonable principles, such as, "it is coherent with
all the physical and natural laws we know, with evidence from the past such as
fossils, is sufficient to explain the current situation as a result of the
theoretical past process, its dynamics can be reproduced here and now exactly in
the way we would expect to be able to reproduce them."... Or something on those
lines.
BTW, Popper doesn't own the "science" trademark of course, and he discards a
helluva lot of disciplines that mainstream science recognize as scientific
(psychoanalysis, etc.)
A
Platt Holden ha scritto:
> The point is that the Darwin Theory of Evolution is not a bona fide
> scientific theory since it can't be experimentally proven one way or the
> other.
>
> Platt
>
>
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