Explaining how to overthrow a theory in science via better explanations, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers advice at Forbes, including advice re Darwinism:
Want to go beyond Darwin’s evolution? You still need to explain the emergence of biological diversity, the response to selection pressures, and how inheritance works, among others. More.
First, it is interesting to hear an admission that anyone might want to go beyond Darwin’s theory, touted elsewhere as the single best idea anyone ever had. Yes, well, things do get oversold at times…
But if the bar is actually set at a better explanation, in the sense of an explanation that explains more of what we see more cogently and provides better predictions, ID theorists might be able to do it. That approach is pretty far from the usual Darwinian stuff (“Ours is the explanation! All others stem from people who are not only Wrong but Bad! If you don’t believe us, you don’t Trust Science! ”
For a broader understanding of the current picture, I recommend Steve Fuller’s Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game, some points of which I summarized in a recent review:
Defenders of the current scientific consensus “tend to operate on the assumption that to give the dissenters any credence would be tantamount to unleashing mass irrationality in society.” In his view, the lions underestimate the ability of science to incorporate dissenters and emerge stronger as a result. He offers an example from the ID controversy: “[N]ow Darwinists need to try harder to defeat it, which we see in their increasingly sophisticated refutations, which often end up with Darwinists effectively conceding points and simply admitting that they have their own way of making their opponents’ points, without having to invoke an ‘intelligent designer.’”
See also: Sociologist: How ID foxes can beat Darwinian lions