Very smart post TJ. I might quibble with the idea that science always requires falsifiability or that evolution ultimately meets this test. I tend to think "belief in evolution," (like to a lesser extent "belief in climate change") is a problematic concept more because there are so many variants of evolutionary theory and how far one takes its implications that to say whether or not one agrees with it ends up not telling very much.
That's a good point: there isn't a real concensus on a lot of specific details of many of the larger issues.
As far as falsificationism, a lot of science is trying to disprove theories, either as a true attempt to achieve it or just to check for consistency. I don't see how you can conduct experiments or collect data on a hypothesis that can't be proven false.
Evolution could be proven false by digging up human remains that contain the same carbon dating age as dinosaurs. Or if we had found that remains thought to be older aren't actually older after using carbon dating. Or if we show our entire understanding of dating is completely wrong. Granted, evolutionary theory does still contain a few holes big enough to ride a T-Rex through in that we are missing a huge amount of proof intermediate states of tons of organisms actually existed. But, the way evolution could be disproven is to collect a bunch of evidence that contradicts it. This would be further complicated that most of the Linnean classification system has been constructed around evolutionary theory. Yet, if we had clear data showing evolution did not actually happen, an awful lot would change.
These examples are particularly thorny; most of the time an attempt to disprove a theory is just taking data and seeing if it follows an equation.
Generally good post, but we would not use
carbon dating to measure the age of dinosaur bones, because carbon dating is only good for up to a million years or so. Potassium-argon dating would be the method of choice.
Still, you are correct, if we start finding stuff that doesn't make sense in light of evolution, like bunny rabbits in the pre-Cambrian then evolution as we know it would be falsified.
What opponents miss, however, is that everything we've seen thus far in biology makes sense in light of evolution, leading to Theodosius Dobzhansky's 1973 essay, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."
Keep up the good posts.
EDIT: I should have read more deeply:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossilsThe limitations of fossils, fossilization being a rare process:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php#e4There are multiple lines of evidence supporting evolution:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/lines/index.shtmlAlso, proof isn't really a concept used in science outside of math. It's the question of whether a hypothesis or theory is the simplest explanation that fits all the evidence (viz. Occam's razor) and isn't contradicted by any of it but could conceivably be contradicted by future evidence (falsifiability). This is because of the problem of induction.
So good post, except for what I pointed out above.
