And yet I've watched a panel of Nobel winners pronounce Darwin's Theory of Evolution the greatest scientific achievement of all time.
And yet it has been observed in the lab and in nature.
It is testable because it make correct predictions about what fossils will be found, and where, and how old they will be. It makes genetic predictions as well, which confirm it.
Not a valid criticism for a forensic science, which tests past events.
Find a fossil rabbit in the precambrian and you've falsified it.
There are no such examples, because no such claims are made. Theories are never proven, only disproved. So far nobody has disproved evolution.
But new species are coming into existence, which disproves the creationist claim that all species were created at once.
Part two:
Part two:
These are reasonable statements. No one ever said that nothing in paleontology, the history of life on earth, literature, technology, or science, could be studied through empirical testing. Nor has anyone claimed that it was not possible to make testable predictions or retrodictions from postulated unique historical events.
For example, from the hypothesis that all life evolved from a common ancestor through an unbroken chain, it is possible to predict that paleontology would uncover evidence in the fossil record of a gradual progression from single cell to man. Likewise, from the hypothesis that life abruptly appeared on earth in complete functional form, it can be predicted that, without exception, the fossil record should show the first appearance of new organs and structures completely formed, and there should be no transitional forms connecting the major different types of organisms such as protozoa and metazoa, invertebrates and vertebrates, fishes and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, etc. These predictions can be tested scientifically -- and they have been, repeatedly. Interestingly, Gillespie indirectly admitted this when he wrote, "There were ways in which Darwin's theory could clearly have been falsified. He named some of them. The absence of transitional fossils, however, was not one of them."
22 In other words, since Gillespie is a believer in Darwinism, he doesn't think it would be right to test the theory against the only direct scientific evidence, the fossil record, for he knows that evolution would flunk the test.
Professor Popper was careful not to contradict his previous clearly written statements that said, "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme." Metaphysics is not science but rather something more closely associated with religion. His calling the activity "research" does not make it scientific for it is possible to research anything, even the most bizarre superstitions. With his generalization that "very often" testable predictions could be derived from unique events, he did not specifically say that evolution was a scientific theory.
Investigators can test some sub-theory predictions of a general theory, but this does not automatically establish the general theory as a completely testable concept. Similarly, the evolution sub-theory that populations change slightly can be tested, but this does not prove that the general theory of common-ancestry evolution is true.
Many other prominent scientists who are evolutionists admit that evolution theory is not really science. For instance, in the introduction to the 1971 edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, Dr. L. Harrison Matthews made the amazingly frank admission that evolution was faith, not science:
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory -- is it then a science or faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation -- both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.
23
Arthur Koestler wrote about the unscientific nature of Darwinism and said that the education system was not properly informing people about this:
In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection -- quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology.
24
In a symposium at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, prominent English evolutionist Dr. C.H. Waddington made some very pointed criticism of neo-Darwinism as being a vacuous tautology. In commenting on a paper by Murray Eden entitled, "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory," Dr. Waddington said:
I am a believer that some of the basic statements of neo-Darwinism are vacuous.... So the theory of neo-Darwinism is a theory of the evolution of the changing of the population in respect to leaving offspring and not in respect to anything else. Nothing else is mentioned in the mathematical theory of neo-Darwinism. It is smuggled in and everybody has in the back of his mind that the animals that leave the largest number of offspring are going to be those best adapted also for eating peculiar vegetation, or something of this sort; but this is not explicit in the theory. All that is explicit in the theory is that they will leave more offspring.
There, you do come to what is, in effect, a vacuous statement: Natural selection is that some things leave more offspring than others; and you ask, which leave more offspring than others; and it is those that leave more offspring; and there is nothing more to it than that.
The whole real guts of evolution -- which is, how do you come to have horses and tigers, and things -- is outside the mathematical theory.
25
Norman Macbeth has written a book, Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason, in which he gave an especially perceptive critique of Darwinism. Noted philosopher of science Karl Popper reviewed this book and endorsed it, calling it "a really important contribution to the debate."
26 In a 1982 interview, Macbeth had much to say about the major problems with evolution theory and about natural selection being a tautology:
27
First, I think, is natural selection. When you ask all the different evolutionists to identify the real heart of evolution, they'll often give you three or four points -- adaption, the number of generations, mutations, and recombination. They've got a list of things that are supposed to be factors, but natural selection is on all lists and is obviously the dominant theory of all evolutionary discussion. With some people, it is the whole thing, so if you knock over natural selection, the whole structure crumbles.
Was natural selection the mechanism for evolution? He replied that it was, along with variation:
Variation is there but it does not accumulate, although they assert always that it does accumulate. Then you extrapolate it for another couple of hundred percent of the problem and you're in. Extrapolation is a terrible sin, so they've little foundation. The variation is there. You can see it, of course, in all the forms of dog we've bred, but accumulation and extrapolation are certainly used in a big way by evolutionists.
But isn't natural selection just a weeding out process? Macbeth explained:
A good evolutionist says it creates because everybody admits that something is weeding out. We are always culling, just as the ordinary operation of an animal's life culls out the really weak ones. A faithful Darwinist says it is creative. Here we have the opposition between evolutionist authors.... Michael Ruse says it can create anything ... largely by slow small changes accumulating. Gould, when you read him very carefully, does not discern that it creates new forms; it can mend and tinker, but it is not producing really big new things.
Gould says that it might tune things up a bit, right? Macbeth replied:
He doesn't go much further than that. This is why he confesses bankruptcy on the macro-evolution problem which Ruse will not confess. Ruse sees no problem at all in macro-evolution but Gould, with a much keener eye for the limitations of natural selection, says we haven't got anything to answer that. He pins his hope for the future on epigenesis which is pure hope.... They think the leap forward would have occurred in the embryological gestation period instead of among mature specimens. To some extent they are pursuing a pipe dream too, hoping to find serious evidence of it.
He told why he wrote that natural selection was an exercise in circular reasoning:
I argued it was a tautology in my book because it seemed to go round in a circle. It was, in effect, defining survival as due to fitness and fitness as due to survival. I also found people like Waddington saying it was a tautology. He said that at the Darwinian centennial in 1959 in Chicago. Nevertheless, he said it was a wonderful idea that explained everything. Professor Ronald H. Brady goes a little more deeply into it in his long articles in Systematic Zoology
28and the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.
29... I will not attempt to summarize Brady's view, but I think it destroys the idea of natural selection and this is certainly the opinion of many people at the American Museum of Natural History. It shoots to pieces the whole basis for the Synthetic Theory.... Few would challenge Brady, but not because they understand and approve.