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Talk:Essay:Evolution is an unproved theory (view source)
Revision as of 00:13, May 22, 2007
, 00:13, May 22, 2007I mischaracterised nothing ;)
I removed the a statement ("and in fact Popper himself asserted that evolution was a falsifiable hypothesis") and its source (Popper, K (1978). "Natural selection and the emergence of mind". Dialectica (32).) because it is apparantly an inaccurate representation of the source. Specifically, according to this [http://www.geocities.com/criticalrationalist/popperevolution.htm site], Popper stated: "The claim that it completely explains evolution is of course a bold claim, and very far from being established." Also, in 1980, Popper hedged in his letter to New Scientist. The assertion that Popper deemed "evolution a falsifiable hypopthesis" is not backed up by Popper's 1980 works, as well as respected authors like Numbers. [[User:HeartOfGold|<big>H</big><small>eart</small><big>O</big><small>f</small><big>G</big><small>old</small>]][[User_talk:HeartOfGold|<sub><small>talk</small></sub>]] 01:12, 21 May 2007 (EDT)
I removed the a statement ("and in fact Popper himself asserted that evolution was a falsifiable hypothesis") and its source (Popper, K (1978). "Natural selection and the emergence of mind". Dialectica (32).) because it is apparantly an inaccurate representation of the source. Specifically, according to this [http://www.geocities.com/criticalrationalist/popperevolution.htm site], Popper stated: "The claim that it completely explains evolution is of course a bold claim, and very far from being established." Also, in 1980, Popper hedged in his letter to New Scientist. The assertion that Popper deemed "evolution a falsifiable hypopthesis" is not backed up by Popper's 1980 works, as well as respected authors like Numbers. [[User:HeartOfGold|<big>H</big><small>eart</small><big>O</big><small>f</small><big>G</big><small>old</small>]][[User_talk:HeartOfGold|<sub><small>talk</small></sub>]] 01:12, 21 May 2007 (EDT)
:I don't really care to much now the inane link from the front page of the evolution page is gone but Popper (1978) does say that particular parts of evolutionary theory are falsifiable (which is whats at question, not whether neo-darwinism completely explains evolution which your quote is about). To my mind the interesting bit is evolution is such a broad theory that finding an individual observation that would bring it all down is hard (in fact the sorts of observations that would are going against things that are just taken as facts; some organisms have more offspring that others, there is some mode of inheritence of traits from parent to offspring...). Instead lots of little hypotheses can be proposed and tested for different parts of the theory. We couldn't deal with those sorts of ideas here without introducing Lakatos' and Kuhne's philosophies of science and that becomes a very big task. --[[User:Igor nz|Igor nz]] 20:13, 21 May 2007 (EDT)