politburo diktat 2.0

Evolution is science. Intelligent Design is belief. What’s the difference?

One key difference is ‘falsifiability,’ the application of a test that could demonstrate that an idea is false. Beliefs are not falsifiable. A simple ‘non-falsifiable belief’ might be the following: “I was kidnapped by aliens at birth and all sensory input, memories, etc. that I think I have experienced, were really just stimuli provided by the aliens to my captive, inert body.” If I believed that, there would be no way for you to falsify it.

Evolution is falsifiable. My friend Michael the Thumper has wearied of my ritual invocation of Precambrian rabbits, as a test that would falsify evolution. Here are six more:

• true chimera (centaurs, mermaids), combinations from different lineages. An Intelligent Designer could put a human torso on a horse. Why not? Sure would have been awesome cavalry in the old days. But the process of evolution doesn’t permit a “mix-and-match” approach. Maybe a centaur seems silly, but there are billions of non-silly combinations that MIGHT have occurred. None have. Find one and you have falsified evolution. (Any commenter stupid enough to suggest that convergent evolution is the same thing, “bats are mammals with wings,” wins today’s booby prize.)
• evidence of not enough time. Evolution has occurred over hundreds of millions, even two billion, years. If there were evidence that the earth is only 6,000 years old, or only 100,000 years old, or even only 100 million years old, that would falsify evolution. In fact, all the geological evidence indicates a 4 billion year age of the earth.
• No means of passing information from parent to offspring. Since beneficial adaptations must be passed down through the generations, evolution depends on a mechanism to do so. (It’s important to note here that Darwin proposed evolutionary theory long before DNA was identified. That’s called the “predictive” power of a scientific theory.) An Intelligent Designer has no need for DNA. He could just “make it so.”
• Evidence of whales and humans and kangaroos and horseshoe crabs coming into existence at the same time.
• Absence of hominid fossils. When Darwin wrote Origin of Species in 1859, there were no pre-human fossil remains. If none had ever been found, that would have falsified evolution (or human evolution, at least).
• Lack of transitional fossils. If we had dug up millions of fossils and not found transitional forms (dinosaurs to birds, equines, whales, bears, hominids, etc.), that would falsify evolution. Evolutionary theory predicts that when we dig up fossils, we will see development and change of forms over time. If we didn’t find transitional forms, that would falsify evolution. In fact, we have found thousands and thousands of transitional forms, documented here. In a stunning display of the “Big Lie” technique, Creationists love to insist that no transitional forms have been found.

A last word about “proof.” Science does not deal in “proofs.” Mathematics does. A scientific theory explains observable facts. All you can do is is test, bend, twist, try to disprove, and otherwise beat up on a theory. You definitely can prove something wrong; as above, that’s falsification. But, in science, you cannot “prove” something right. All you can do, is say, “After thousands of attempts to disprove it, we can’t. Therefore we accept it as a working model, as fact.”

My offer to the ID’ers remains on the table. Suggest ONE TEST by which we might falsify Intelligent Design. Above are seven falsifiability tests for evolution. If ID is science, can’t you give me just one falsifiability test for ID?