>BH>I found Popper's recantment a little surprising. I had heard so
>much about
>>it on talk.origins that I was really expecting something more forceful...
>>Consider also that the paper was originally presented as the first Darwin
>>Lecture at Darwin College, Cambridge.
>
SJ:=====
>Agreed. It could be argued that Popper's "recantation" was
>just a sop to the Darwinists like Halstead who criticised
>him publicly.
Perhaps it *could* be argued, but it *shouldn't* be without
strong evidence.
SJ:======
>This is what Popper originally wrote in his autobiography
>"Unended Quest":
>
Thanks for this quote and reference, I had not read his original
statement.
[quotes snipped]
SJ:======
>Nowehere does Popper actually deny his earlier claim that:
>
>"...Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical
>research programme-a possible framework for testable scientific
>theories...Darwinism is not a scientific theory but metaphysical."
yes, this is interesting. Does Popper define clearly what he means
by Darwinism? He seems to be using Darwinism in the quote you gave
in the same way he uses natural selection in the quote I gave.
Let's go back to the beginning of my original quote:
When speaking here of Darwinism, I shall speak always of
today's theory--that is Darwin's own theory of natural
selection supported by the Mendelian theory of heredity,
by the theory of the mutation and recombination of genes
in a gene pool, and the decoded genetic code. This is an
immensely impressive and powerful theory. The claim that
it completely explains evolution is of course a bold claim,
and very far from being established. All scientific theories
are conjectures, even those that have successfully passed
many and varied tests. The Mendelian underpinning of
modern Darwinism has been well tested, and so has the theory
of evolution which says that all terrestrial life has evolved
from a few primitive unicellular organisms, possibly even
from one single organism.
However, Darwin's own most important contribution to the
theory of evolution, his theory of natural selection, is
difficult to test. There are some tests, even some
experimental tests; and in some cases, such as the famous
phenomenom known as "industrial melanism", we can observe
natural selection happening under our very eyes, as it were.
Nevertheless, really severe tests of the theory of natural
selection are hard to come by, much more so than tests of
otherwise comparable theories in physics or chemistry.
-- Popper
Here he defines Darwinism carefully and makes it clear that it is
only natural selection that he considers difficult to test. Perhaps
he is careful here because he wasn't careful before, resulting in
confusion as to what his point was.
========================
Brian Harper |
Associate Professor | "It is not certain that all is uncertain,
Applied Mechanics | to the glory of skepticism" -- Pascal
Ohio State University |
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