[dan1123]

But, he said: “We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory.”

You can't bring 10,000 layers of geological strata, a living dinosaur, a living pharoah, or a star into a laboratory either. There is more to science than Popperian falsification.

Ironically, some evolution proponents insist on Popperian falsification as the definition of science in order to attack Creationism or Intelligent Design. Everything would be a lot better if people would admit that science rests more on utility rather than logic.

[RobbyS]

On maybe patterns of inference or whatever one wishes to call it. I have read a short biography of Newton whose author I cannot now recall who relates that even as a child Newton was intrigued by patterns of light he saw and as he mastered the math of the day used it began to build his theories of reality. After all, by the age of twenty he had substantially formulated them. Whatever “insight” is, it plays a larger role than the simple piling up of evidence.