Paper. “Popper, in approx 1978 for the most part, took his criticisms of Darwinism back. But when John Horgan interviewed Popper in 1992, Horgan noted that Popper “blurted out that he still found Darwin’s theory dissatisfying. “One ought to look for alternatives!” Popper exclaimed, banging his kitchen table.” ”
See also: Laszlo Bencze on the current campaign against Karl Popper’s falsification criterion for science. “I assume that these critics have only read other people’s writings about Popper and not Popper himself.”
and
Question for multiverse theorists: To what can science appeal, if not evidence?
Of course one ought to look for alternatives. One should also look for ways to improve on the existing theory. Does Horgan imply that Popper thought that none of this had been happening? If he did then that would suggest he was out of touch with the field he was criticizing
Does Horgan indicate if Popper was aware that by 1992, the theory of evolution had moved some way beyond Darwin’s original thesis?
Seversky, what you call ‘improving’ Darwinian theory is actually “adding ad hoc theories” and is actually another sure sign that we are dealing with a pseudoscience instead of a real science.
Thomas Kuhn, of paradigm shift fame, stated, “when faced with an anomaly, a theory’s defenders “will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.”
And Darwinists are the reigning kings of making up “ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.”
As Dr. Hunter noted: “With each new absurdity another new complicated just-so story is woven into evolutionary theory.”
Darwinists simply refuse to let any countervailing evidence falsify their religion:
And as William James Murray quipped,,,
As to ‘moving way beyond Darwin’ by 1992, if you mean that natural selection itself was being cast under the bus by then, you are right.
But that is hardly ‘improving Darwin’s theory’.
That is ripping the heart out of Darwin’s theory and trying to prop up its stinking corpse with nothing but blind faith in atheistic materialism.
Moreover, all the proposed materialistic alternatives to Darwin’s theory that try to ‘fill the gap’, as it were, left by the gross inadequacies found in Darwin’s theory, and as Stephen Meyer has pointed out in his book “Darwin’s Doubt”, all fail on some level or other. Some replacement theories fail more so than others. But they all fail. The primary failure of each is, of course, trying to account for the origination of information.
Off topic:
Dr. Paul Giem is up to chapter 11 of his review of John Sanford’s new book “Contested Bones”:
Seversky:
Alternatives to what, exactly? Accidents happened are here we are can be dismissed without effort.
What existing theory? Accidents happened and here we are don’t count as a theory
There still isn’t a scientific theory of evolution and natural selection is still the only posited mechanism capable of producing the appearance of design- but it has failed to pan out in that regard.
Darwin’s Theory is the alternative. We still can’t show that imperfect fidelity in a self-replicating system will yield a more sophisticated system, or even a good reason to believe it.
Engineering, a set of fields that are even more useful than evolutionary hypotheses have been useless, contradicts it in both theory and practice.
I mean, genetic algorithms were inspired by such; but what is a genetic algorithm, if not a poor man’s configuration search heuristic? The pseudorandomness does alleviate the need for properly structuring and storing memory of past attempts, but you’re going to repeat yourself A LOT for being lazy/indulging your slot machine addiction.
bornagain77 @ 2
Not so. Adding auxiliary theories to adjust the existing theory is a perfectly valid approach in science If that doesn’t work then something new may be required. It’s called adjusting theory to fit data, I need hardly point out how critical you Hunter and WJM would be if science refused to accommodate a theory to new data.
I don’t know where you get your understanding of evolution but if you think Darwin’s original theory has been “cast under the bus” you should look at some different sources. Natural selection is still a part of evolutionary theory, even if it is no longer thought to be the only, nor even the primary, process involved.
Seversky:
According to Futuyma’s university textbook “Evolution” natural selection is still the only posited mechanism capable of producing adaptations. It is still the only mechanism tat is seen as being able to produce design without a designer.
Other mechanisms cause mere change in allele frequency.
There still isn’t a scientific theory of evolution. There still isn’t any evidence that natural selection is a designer mimic. And there still isn’t any evidence that blind and mindless processes can do anything more than cause genetic diseases and deformities.
as to:
Not according to Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn. According to them it is a sure sign we are dealing with a pseudoscience.
as to:
I get my information from empirical evidence and population genetics (not from Darwinian “just so stories”).
Natural Selection is now shown to be grossly inadequate as the supposed ‘designer substitute’.
As Dr. Richard Sternberg states in the following video, “Darwinism provided an explanation for the appearance of design, and argued that there is no Designer — or, if you will, the designer is natural selection. If that’s out of the way — if that (natural selection) just does not explain the evidence — then the flip side of that is, well, things appear designed because they are designed.”
And when looking at Natural Selection from the physical perspective of what is actually going on, as this following video does, (princess and the pea paradox & quarter power scaling) that is to say when looking at Natural Selection with empirical evidence, then it is very easy to see exactly why Natural Selection is grossly inadequate as the supposed ‘Designer substitute’ that Darwinists have falsely imagined it to be.
Even many leading Darwinists, such as Larry Moran, readily acknowledge that Natural Selection is now falsified by population genetics as the supposed ‘Designer substitute’.
Without Natural Selection, Darwinists are, basically, now reduced to arguing, with their appeal to Neutral Theory, that pure chance, all by it’s lonesome, produced all the elegant Design we see around us in life.
In the following article Larry Moran quotes Austin Hughes who states, ‘Darwinism asserts that natural selection is the driving force of evolutionary change. It is the claim of the neutral theory, on the other hand, that the majority of evolutionary change is due to chance.’
Thus, with Natural selection being tossed by the wayside by the mathematics of population genetics, (and by empirical evidence), as the supposed “Designer substitute” for the ‘appearance of design’ that we see in life, Darwinists did not accept such a devastating finding from population genetics as an outright falsification for their theory, as they should have done, but are instead now reduced to arguing that the ‘appearance of design’ that we see in pervasively throughout life is, basically, the result of pure chance with natural selection now playing a very negligible role if any role at all.
To call such a move on the part of Darwinists disingenuous would be an understatement.