Care to tell us what would falsify this theory of evolution?
The ToE is a large and complex theory, so to falsify the
whole ToE, an awful lot of hypotheses would need to be wrong. However, it's possible to break it down and come up with observations that would falsify various parts of it. Or would have - there are things that weren't known at the time the ToE emerged and could have turned out to contradict it, but didn't.
There is now so much evidence for the origination of life's diversity through evolution (from the fossil record to molecular phylogenetics), and for some of the specifics (e.g. adaptation through selection) that nothing short of a miracle could completely overturn them.
That doesn't mean they are unfalsifiable, only that they aren't awfully likely to be falsified. They could have been.
For example, evolution by natural selection would be dead if there were no beneficial mutations - or even if beneficial mutations existed, but couldn't actually lead to adaptation in the wild for whatever reason.
As Darwin noted
in Origin, if a feature was found in an organism that existed
solely for the benefit of another creature, it would "annihilate" his theory:
Origin said:
Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species; though throughout nature one species incessantly takes advantage of, and profits by, the structure of another. But natural selection can and does often produce structures for the direct injury of other species, as we see in the fang of the adder, and in the ovipositor of the ichneumon, by which its eggs are deposited in the living bodies of other insects. If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.
Common descent would be falsified if it turned out that lineages were unable to split, since for two or more different life forms to share a common ancestor, they must have
diverged from that ancestor.
Or, for that matter, if any evidence was found of your boundaries that nature cannot cross, we'd be in trouble.
Or, for that matter, if we never saw novelties - new genes at the very least - form.
The neat idea of common descent producing a tree of life
was falsified by the discovery of (really quite extensive) horizontal gene transfer. The tree of life is only a good approximation of what's going on for some groups of organisms. When you get to things like bacteria, individual genes may have family trees, but the history of the organisms themselves is more of a tangled net.
Positive evidence that the
appearance of evolution was produced by some other process (say, divine intervention
) also comes here.
And the obligatory mention of the Precambrian bunny - anything that out of place wouldn't necessarily invalidate everything else we have inferred about the history of life on earth, but it
would be a puzzle current evolutionary theory couldn't solve.
And I mean falsify it -- I don't mean send you guys behind closed doors to peer review yourselves to death, only to come out with one or two new theories.
*rolleyes* Talking to you would be a lot less frustrating if you could drop the endless science-hating for just a moment. What's wrong with peer-review anyway? (I could probably think of a few things that are "wrong" with it, but I want to know why
you are so cynical about it.)
And while you're at it, care to tell us what evidence those who peer review against this theory of evolution use to try and refute it?
While we are at it, care to show me an example or two of "those"?
Or, as I suspect, evolution is treated like it's as rock-solid as mathematics?
Not quite as rock-solid as mathematics, but as rock-solid as any scientific theory. If you're happy with relativity, atomic theory or quantum mechanics, you ought to be happy with evolution. It's no less well-evidenced than those.
I can guarantee you, if observations pop up that contradict what we think we know of evolution, they
will be picked up by science. It happens on a smaller scale all the time, and that's why the ToE of today is a different theory from what it was 150 years ago.
