To take a simple example, when Darwin was observing birds in Chile and the Galapagos, he was collecting evidence which he synthesized into his theory about descent. Proportional evidence led to his hypothesis and caused him to write a book that changed the way scientists think about variation among and between species. Without that evidence there would be no theory. So the claim that science is about falsification and not verification is quite strange. Falsification always presupposes verification.
It would be hard for me to imagine a better description of what Darwin did not do. Every step of Darwin’s process was marked by conjecture and error corrections, which is the opposite of evidence just handing you a theory to run with.
The empiricist bed time story doesn’t work on its face, even if we didn’t know the details of Darwin’s journey. The evidence for natural selection was "observed" by anatomically modern humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet it wasn’t until 1838 that the idea was created and, the kicker, was published semi-independently by 2 different men at the same time in 1858. If the evidence “told” Darwin the theory of natural selection, why didn’t the evidence tell someone else twenty thousand years prior? If ever there was a good example of how layers upon layers of explanation and slow philosophical progress over thousands of years can build to a new way of interpreting the same old drab evidence that was always available to everyone, the theory of evolution by natural selection is it.
Even now, “evidence” is raining down upon your head and mine that, if we only knew how to interpret it, would win us a Noble prize.
Would there have been a theory without the evidence? Of course not, evidence plays a pivotal role. But given that evidence for natural selection was available to every human ever, it would be debaucherous to claim the evidence led to the theory. It is our guesswork that even tells us which evidence to look for in the first place.
As it happens we do have the details of Darwin’s journey, and not only did he not observe natural selection (this much is obvious), he did not even “observe” his own evidence that ruled out natural selection’s rivals. And I don’t mean in the technical sense described above that what we see with our eyes is actually a very flawed image created by the brain, thus is never directly observed, though that is true as well. I mean Darwin *did not know what he observed* until friends back in England helped him understand. He confused finches for grosbeaks. He confused other finches for blackbirds. He mixed up species for varieties in rheas and mockingbirds, and stumbled through a myriad of other misconceptions, bad guesses, and dead ends until he finally arrived at a good idea.
That theory of natural selection is the combined product of fallible human creative thought, building more or less on contributions from John Gould, Richard Owen, Lamark, Cuvier, and Malthus. Not to mention other concepts on which the theory depends; such as cause and effect, heredity, natural law, and deep geological time. And not one of these concepts is observed as is. Humans had to create the ideas, then test them against the evidence. Conjecture and refutation bruh.
