http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/15854/sparks_of_life_darwinism_and_...

Advocates of Intelligent Design creationism like to play Stump the Scientist by asking evolutionary biologists "what would disprove evolution?" Scientists often have trouble answering this question, leaving some people with the impression that evolutionary theory is no more scientific than Intelligent Design (ID).

This challenge is based on the idea of falsifiability, which was formalized by the philosopher Karl Popper as the test to separate science from non-science. Scientists generally dismiss ID on the grounds that in cannot be falsified (though it's proponents disagree)...

They retort that evolution cannot be falsified

a bit naieve
    evolution wasn't always given
    evolution involves multiple hypotheses, so we need to specify: I'll choose "existing multitudes and diversity arose from a relatively small population with less diversity"

It's hard to make exact predictions in something as complicated as life.
We deal with plausibility and likelihood.
These methods are apparent in statistical tests

Why scientists have trouble: We've been brought up in the scientific consensus. The things that were the "test" when evolution was new are now just facts that fit the story. We test hypotheses within the evolutionary framework.

• Opening
• Is evolution scientific?
• • falsifiable
  • popper and evolution

• Rising to the challenge.
• • Redefine question
  • answer question
• Why the question is hard
• •  OTher answers
  • • paleontology
    • history
    • • (now we take it for granted)
      • "if everything we knew turned out to be false"
  • Rephrasing. Survival of the fittest hypotheses
  • • popper is 20th century
    • individual events do not "disprove" theory
    • too hard to make all-or-none predictions for something as complicated as evolution
    • often deal with more or less likely (after all, do we just discard a theory because it is limited: newtonian mechanics)
    • statistical methodology (reject vs ML): force it onto a tree, or have multifurcation
• Implications for ID and philosophical materialism
• • challenge originates with ID, pseudoscience
  • assert that scientists stick to evolution because either their personal metaphysics or part of the scientific method (what they call philosophical materialism) prevents them from rejecting it
  • I actually thought of SG as something that would make ID plausible. I consider it implausible (and pseudoscience) because there is no evidence of the process that they claim produced the pattern of biodiversity (aside from the pattern itself). As such, there is no way to make any predictions about the pattern, and there is no way to validate any inferences about the process. Not only is there no way to falsify the general theory of ID, but there is no way to falsify any hypothesis generated within that theoretical framework.