Hi Runner.. your Popper quote is challenging for sure.. and persuasive to an open mind I believe.

I found out a few things.

TRASPOSONS. Since excessive transposon activity can destroy a genome, many organisms seem to have developed mechanisms to reduce transposition to a manageable level.

GENE DUPLICATION seems more favorable to an evolutionary process.
seems to me though, that things must have become very complex before such a thing could happen, and even this (in my view) seems to point to design more than chance.

In fact each of the processes mentioned by Prof Bugsy, could equally be explained by design.. but thats just my unlearned view.

There are two ways that this topic may be approached, and we have seen both here in this little thread.

On the one hand, we can accept that there is still much to learn about how we evolved to be who we are, and our relationship with this tiny insignificant world and its other inhabitants.

When we arrive at a point where our research is unable to find an immediate answer, we take copious notes about what we do know, test again the hypotheses that allowed us to reach this point, and carry on.

We might sit back and think more carefully about the question. Is it the right one - i.e. will the answer actually illuminate, or is it just a dead end?

We might make more efforts to understand how others have reached their positions, and see if that can provide any clues as to how to examine the evidence further.

We might pose further questions ourselves. What if a previous answer has been misleading, or contains some conclusions that sounded good at the time, but that no-one has revisited for a while?

In short, there is a section of the population that accepts that there will always be more questions than answers, and that part of the excitement of being alive is to continue to examine them, critically and constructively, in the hopes of uncovering just another tiny corner of the mystery.

And then there are those who as soon as they come across anything that their mind cannot immediately grasp, say "God did it".

>>In fact each of the processes mentioned by Prof Bugsy, could equally be explained by design.. but thats just my unlearned view.<<

But the thing is Asst. Prof Boazy, intelligent design can be made to explain ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. It has been proposed that an 'intelligent designer' (IDers often claim to have no assumptions on who it is, but three guesses as to who they think it is) designed the universe itself, life and everything in between. That is what actually makes it perfectly useless as a theory. If all the answers are the same (ie "it was designed", or "god did it"), then all the questions become meaningless and useless.

Here's a question: if an intelligent creator designed everything, how did they do it? What were the processes (forces) used that called everything into being? Answer that and you get a lollipop.

"I think that all it shows is that the definition used in the argument is inadequate (or at least too limited) to explain exactly what science is."

It encompasses all of modern technology and almost all of what is usually regarded as science. Evolution is the 'odd one out'. The definition was taught in high school science. It is the only definition that distuinguishes science from other fields of study and excludes clearly unscientific studies such as mysticism. It is the only way to define science meaningfully.

Ok, freediver, assuming that only empiricism can give a science credibility, then what about non-empirical sciences like mathematics? Maths not science?

However, there are many facets and parts to evolutionary theory, pretty much all of them empirical and grounded in observation and experiment. Paleontology of course is difficult to categorise, but even they have experimental methods. The falsifiability part comes in where tests (like dating methods) return results that are inconsistent with expectations, hypotheses are then updated to include this evidence- that's science.

The proclamation that the theory of evolution fails the "falsifiability" test is in error. The theory consists of many sub-parts, all of which are falsifiable.

"Maths not science?

Correct. It's maths. Maths, science and history all have fundamentally different research methods that define them very well and in a way that agrees with most 'lay people's' impression of the field.

More info on maths vs science:

http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1176702993

"However, there are many facets and parts to evolutionary theory, pretty much all of them empirical and grounded in observation and experiment.

Hence my distinction between evolution and natural selection?

"Paleontology of course is difficult to categorise, but even they have experimental methods.

They may appear to be experiments. Perhaps you could give an example so I can explain why they aren't.

http://www.ozpolitic.com/evolution/what-is-experiment.html

"The falsifiability part comes in where tests (like dating methods) return results that are inconsistent with expectations, hypotheses are then updated to include this evidence- that's science.

That isn't falsifiability.

http://www.ozpolitic.com/evolution/science-methodology.html