Falsifiability of evolution

Whether or not evolution is falsifiable has been the subject of much debate by creationists and evolutionists.

Falsifiability: a requirement of science

It is widely accepted that an important requirement for a theory to be considered scientific is whether or not it is falsifiable. The scientific method can never "prove" anything to be true, because there might still be some undiscovered circumstance in which something is not true. Instead, scientists propose and carry out test to attempt to determine if a proposition is false. The more that they fail to falsify a proposition, the more likely it is to be true.

In order for this to work, however, there must actually be a way to falsify a proposition. If a person claims that six weeks ago they drank three glasses of water for the day, there is no way that particular claim can possibly be shown to be false (barring the existence of witnesses). It is therefore not even possible to prove his claim to be wrong, so the claim is said to be unfalsifiable, and therefore not a scientific claim.

Philosopher of science Karl Popper proposed that falsifiability be a requirement for something to be considered scientific, and this has come to be an accepted requirement in the scientific community.

Evolutionists acknowledging that evolution is not falsifiable

Creationists have argued that evolution is not a scientific theory because it is not falsifiable, and in this respect they have the support of Popper himself, as well as other evolutionists.

Although supporting evolution, Popper himself said:

Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme.

Popper, trying to distance himself from creationists, later tried to retract the claim. However, he is not the only one to have made similar claims.

Birch and Ehrlich previously wrote in Nature:

Our theory of evolution has become, as Popper described, one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus outside of empirical science but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems, have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training.

Dr. Whitten later said:

Biologists are simply naïve when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants.

Claims of falsification tests

Evolutionists will often respond to claims that evolution is not falsifiable by proposing tests whereby it may be falsified.

One scientist who did actually propose tests of the evolutionary hypothesis with a view to considering them falsifiable was J.B.S. Haldane. In 1949 he proposed that evolution could be falsified if "various mechanisms, such as the wheel and magnet, which would be useless till fairly perfect" were found in nature. Since then wheels and magnets have been found in nature.

Another test that he proposed was that the discovery of rabbits in Precambrian strata would disprove evolution.

This could be broadened to discovering anything in the fossil record that was grossly "out of place", and indeed others have proposed that finding a human fossil in Jurassic sediments would disprove evolution.

However, the problem is whether any such finds really would falsify evolution in the minds of evolutionists. The example of Haldane's proposals regarding wheels and magnets would suggest that they wouldn't.

According to creationists:

Many fossils and artefacts have been found ‘out of place’.⁷ That is, they are in strata that the evolutionist says represent a period of time when, for example, that organism did not live, or human artefacts could not have been made. There are plenty of examples; some published in respectable journals before the evolutionary paradigm became locked in. Such examples do not get published in modern standard evolutionary journals, possibly because it is inconceivable that such could exist in the evolutionary world-view. In another context, Nobel Prize winner Sir Fred Hoyle said,

‘Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked

by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run up against a paradigm, and the editors

will turn it down.’⁸

Forbidden Archeology, by Cremo and Thompson, lists some out-of-place human artefacts.⁹. ...

Human fossils have been found, hundreds of them, but generally in deposits which most creationists would think were post-Flood ... .

In regard to whether things found together necessarily lived and died together, paleontologists can inspect fossils for damage due to ‘reworking’ for clues that the organisms did not necessarily live or die together. However, the ‘reworked’ or ‘stratigraphic leak’ (where something ‘young’ is found in ‘old’ rock) explanation is almost invariably invoked for ‘out-of-place’ fossils.

Further reading

• Science, Religion, Creation and Evolution: Does Evolution Meet the Criterion of Falsifiability

Bibliography

• Batten, et. al., Don (2007), "January 2007", The Creation Answers Book, chapter 15
• Birch, L.C. & P.R. Ehrlich (22 April 1967), "Evolutionary History and Population Biology,", Nature 214
• Dewar, D.; L.M. Davies & J.B.S. Haldane (1949), Is Evolution a Myth? A Debate between D. Dewar and L.M. Davies vs. J.B.S. Haldane, London: Paternoster
• Popper, Karl (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery

• Popper, Karl (1976), Unended Quest (Revised ed.), La Salle, Ill.: Open Court
• Sarfati, Jonathan (2001), Is the design explanation legitimate?, The True.Origin Archive