[extropy-chat] against ID

[gts]

I have not yet read the article about Lakatos, but it seems that if ID  
ever gets to the Supreme Court that Popper's falsification principle will  
rule the day:

"Ordinarily, a key question to be answered in determining whether a theory  
or technique is scientific knowledge that will assist the trier of fact  
will be whether it can be (and has been) tested. "Scientific methodology  
today is based on generating hypotheses and testing them to see if they  
can be falsified; indeed, this methodology is what distinguishes science  
 from other fields of human inquiry." Green, at 645. See also C. Hempel,  
Philosophy of Natural Science 49 (1966) ("[T]he statements constituting a  
scientific explanation must be capable of empirical test"); K. Popper,  
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge 37 (5th  
ed. 1989) ("[T]he criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its  
falsifiability, or refutability, or testability")."

Daubert v. Merrell Dow 509 U.S. 579 (1993).

(Found this in a discussion at  
http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/11/poppers_hegemon.html)

I have seen general criticisms of Popper by Lakatos and similar to which  
Popperians would respond that Popper's views are a prescription to  
science, not a description of it.

I'm drawn to Popper because he rejects positivism as the central tenet of  
science, allowing science to escape the ID charge of being a form of  
religion, at least as positivists themselves might define the word, and  
because in general I like his idea of evolutionary epistemology. From what  
I hear, memetics is dead or on hold because of questions about how the  
science should proceed, but I think Popper's basic theory of knowledge  
should survive and multiply. (Now that I think of it, perhaps his theory  
answers the ontology problem in memetics: it suggests that memes are  
better understood as objective virus-like behaviors than as subjective  
virus-like ideas.)

One could say evolution is about finding solutions to the problem of  
survival through trial and error. This is  also Popper's view of how  
science progresses. It will be sweet to watch anti-evolution defeated by  
evolution. Problem solved.

-gts