Flint
Posts: 478
Joined: Jan. 2006
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Randy:
After reading through this discussion, I have two points I think should be highlighted and addressed directly:
1) When you speak of evolution, are you talking about the fact or the theory of evolution? The fact of evolution consists of a very very large number of interrelated observations. These are the raw data. The theory of evolution (theories, more correctly. There are differences of opinion here) is a proposed explanation of the observations.
When you ask if evolution is falsifiable, it sounds a great deal like you are asking if it's possible that evolution itself did not happen. No, this is not possible. Evolution has always happened, and happens today. If you are asking if our explanations of the mechanisms by which evolution happens are falsifiable, I'd go further and say they are almost surely false in some way - incomplete, only partially correct, etc. But science ALWAYS assumes that EVERY theory can be improved.
2) Abiogenesis (the emergence of life from non-life) is NOT evolution, and really has little to do with evolution. Evolution as we're using it here is the study of how existing life forms change over time to become somewhat different life forms. How life got started in the first place is a distinctly different topic.
I think the conflation of these two different fields derives not from scientific confusion but rather from creationist doctrine. That doctrine says that abiogenesis and evolution are the *same thing* - that God poofed life into existence as we see it today (with minor unimportant variations), and thus abiogenesis and evolution are both buzzwords denoting the very same act of divine creation. But science sees them as very different.
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