It depends on what you mean by substantial I guess. I don't define substantial misunderstanding of flight as using what we know to fly thousands of planes everyday with little fatal mishaps. Why do you think we are missing substantial information about flight?
Because we can't coherently explain why planes fly. We can model the condition under which it occurs quite well, which is why we can build quite effective planes - but that does not explain why these conditions result in lift. The Romans built Aquaducts that worked for more than a thousand years, on incorrect ideas of flow and pressure. Newtonian mechanics was perfectly fine for railways, bridges, skyscrapers, etc. Practical effects does not mean the theory is an adequate explanation.
You misunderstand evolution then. It is not just loking at fossils. It is very easy to falsify, here are a few
I have no beef with Evolution, but it is a poor example as I stated. None of those falsify Speciation by Natural Selection, you are addressing ancillary ideas and theories that are part of the Kuhnian paradigm in which you find Evolution. You are doing the same thing as many creationists, where everything vaguely related is all labelled evolution.
If I claim Steve killed his wife with a cricket bat, showing Steve owns a bat and is an avid cricketer, supports it. But if Steve wasn't, it would not falsify the claim, though remove circumferential support. Steve could still have killed her in that manner. This is the same type of thing you are doing here.
If it could be shown that organisms with identical DNA have different genetic traits.
This falsifies Mendellian heritability and genetics.
If it could be shown that mutations do not occur.
Does not address evolution, again, but a mechanism proposed for it. In many ways, the problem here is more one of showing causation, as mutations are usually innocuous or strongly removed from the genome via cellular mechanisms or through things like genetic disease. Hence we have stability of species over time. True, this does falsify most of our modern proposed mechanism for evolution if no mutations occurred, but this fact offers very little support to the theory itself. It was, after all, proposed long before we realised mutations occurred.
If it could be shown that when mutations do occur, they are not passed down through the generations.
If it could be shown that although mutations are passed down, no mutation could produce the sort of phenotypic changes that drive
natural selection.
They usually aren't in general, and much of our ideas thereon are based on current data and assuming a rate we transpose into the past. We explain current diversity by assuming mutation and that this was passed down, but this doesn't show our reasoning valid. If the genomes were different, we could have argued another way. So again, we cannot demonstrate this sufficiently due to the long periods of investigation we would require. Micro-organisms don't help either, as they have mechanisms like plasmids that exchange DNA. This is thus hard to falsify itself. Largely a Petitio Principii, therefore.
Fossils in the wrong place (e.g., mammals in the Devonian). If the fossil record were all out of order like this (a single anomalous fossil might not overturn everything, of course, since it could be in the wrong place for other reasons), we’d have to seriously question the occurrence of evolution.
No, that would only falsify the ways people say it occurred, how the clades are said to be, not its occurence per say. Besides, this has happened, where extinctions were assumed and later found to be flawed by other fossils. The strongest support is in the fossil record, but it is a plastic support, in that the evolutionary record will always be adjusted to fit it, not falsify it.
A general lack of genetic variation in species. Evolution depends on genetic variation. If most species had none, they couldn’t evolve. However, the universal efficacy of artificial selection (I’m aware of only three lab experiments that failed to show a response to such breeding experiments), shows that genetic variation is ubiquitous in nearly all species.
Many species have low diversity, and then people say they had bottlenecks - such as amongst certain big cats. Genetic variation does not falsify evolution, again Mendellian Heritability for artificial selection, else Petitio Principii.
There are many more. It has never been falsified to the point that it needs to be thrown out
It has never been falsified as it is almost impossible to do so. None of these examples are robust methods to do so. The problem is the necessity of applying retrospective reasoning.
I am not going to argue on Evolution further though, as it has no bearing on this thread, and as I said, I have no problem with it, though consider it a poor example of the successful application of scientific method. Besides, I fail to see the point you are trying to make. No matter how well supported, the leap from Scientifically sound to Fact is not demonstrable, by the very nature of Scientific method.
Nevermind. You just want to change what I said. Stay healthy.
What did I change? You said you consider it poor evidence, but you never explained why, and only tried semantic trickery around 'standard of evidence' to obfuscate, seems to me. You argue for some certainty from Empiric methodology, then turn around and ignore a strong correlation thereof. I really don't understand what you are trying to do here, as all of it seems hopelessly muddled and confused.
