[Right Wing Professor]

As you point out, all musings in this area are hopelessly (but unfortunately necessarily) tainted with secondary hypotheses to explain details. The problem is that there is no way to test and verify a hypothesis, as there are any number of alternate, secondary hypothesis that could be invoked to save any other hypothesis.

I pointed out no such thing.

There are scads of endogenous retroviruses. It would beggar belief that one had not been deleted somewhere in the human ancestral line.

You seem to think I'm a devoté of naive falsificationism. I'm not. A well-established theory like evolution could be falsified, but it would to take more than one apparently anomalous result. Haldane's bunny in the Cambrian (which, of course, was just a quip on his part, anyway) would be a serious issue, but it would likely give rise to a lot of speculation that it wasn't a bunny, or it wasn't in the Cambrian. What would kill evolution is if bunnies, and dogs, and chimps turned up in all sorts of palaeozoic strata. They haven't.

[johnnyb_61820]

"You seem to think I'm a devoté of naive falsificationism."

I'm not either. But the person who started this thread was. I was pointing out why that is a bad idea, and, under such a view, their theories have already been falsified.

Often times in crevo debates there is a lot of posturing on the evolution side about falisification, but in reality the demarcation arguments have completely failed. You can agree or disagree with creationism, but to use a demarcation argument to say that one is under the realm of science while the other is not is counter to the current understanding of the philosophy of science.