Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

Can Darwinism Be Falsified?

If you say that there is a biological feature which cannot be explained by Darwinian processes (irreducible complexity, for example), Darwinists will protest. We just haven't discovered the path.

So the question I have is: can a Darwinist please describe a biological feature which would falsify Darwinism?

Someone had a similar thought:

would like Derbyshire to think about this, and suggest such an experiment. It is a question of genuine interest, and even some proponents of evolutionism would like to hear proposals. The question is simply this: Can any new research help us decide whether organisms were either designed, or arose by the purely random collision of material particles?

Possibly, Mr. D will conclude that no such experiment is possible. Darwinism is so loosely structured (to put it politely) that it is capable of "explaining" any and every organism. If an organism exists, it is "fit," and therefore Darwinism accounts for it. But as Derbyshire may also have heard, a theory that explains everything, without any possibility of encountering a falsifying instance, is not really a scientific theory at all. It is philosophy dressed up as science. It is, in fact, pseudoscience -- the kind that gives Mr. D so much idle amusement.

A criticism of intelligent design is that the claim, "God can do anything, therefore this critter was designed by God" gets us nowhere. I agree that it doesn't. But a very similar objection can be raised against Darwinism. Its partisans are at liberty to say of any organism whatever that it arose by mutation and natural selection -- without having to produce any supporting evidence. In the end, it amounts to nothing more than the belief that supernaturalism must be avoided at all cost. Looked at this way, Darwinism is simply a deduction from a philosophy -- the philosophy of materialism (sometimes called naturalism).

Labels: evolution