Replies

I think the reasoning behind elevating his importance must go something like this:
Popper stated that all theories must withstand attempts at falsification. The Theory of Evolution has never been falsified. The Theory of Evolution cannot possibly be true (according to the literal creationist). Therefore, no one has ever tried to falsify it.
Of course, that kind of reasoning is extremely circular.
Please, actually read Popper, not paraphrases of folks who purport to have read him.
who is relatively unknown among scientists
It's always a mistake to assume one's own ignorance to be characteristic of others in one's own profession. Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. He was also a social and political philosopher of considerable stature, a self-professed ‘critical-rationalist’, a dedicated opponent of all forms of scepticism, conventionalism, and relativism in science and in human affairs generally, a committed advocate and staunch defender of the ‘Open Society’, and an implacable critic of totalitarianism in all of its forms. One of the many remarkable features of Popper's thought is the scope of his intellectual influence. In the modern technological and highly-specialised world scientists are rarely aware of the work of philosophers; it is virtually unprecedented to find them queuing up, as they have done in Popper's case, to testify to the enormously practical beneficial impact which that philosophical work has had upon their own.
So much for his being "relatively unknown among scientists."

Please note that I did not comment on anything Popper may or may not have said, nor will I. I figure that after being filtered through "creation science" think tanks, his true meaning is as distorted as the original meaning of a Chinese document machine translated into English through the intermediaries of Norwegian and Swahili. The paragraph after the colon was an expression of my hypothesis as to why literal creationists seem to think Popper is important. So far, a few posts of others on this thread are consistent with my hypothesis, and no posts contradict it.

I will point out that your link to the Popper bio bit goes to the Stanford philosophy department. That does not support the hypothesis that Popper is influential or well-known among scientists. Out of curiosity, I went back and checked the indices of various textbooks: Molecular Biology of the Cell, Genes IV, Cell, Physics, Genetics, Biochemistry, etc. In none of them did I find mention of Popper. True, not all of them mention names in the indices, but even among those textbooks that index scientists by name, I did not find Popper mentioned. Then I went to PubMed and did a search on popper, karl, which returned 72 items, of which 9 (12.5%) were articles having Popper, HH, as an author and were therefore unrelated to the subject of my search.

So much for the contention that Popper is either well-known or influential among scientists.

“your link to the Popper bio bit goes to the Stanford philosophy department. That does not support the hypothesis that Popper is influential or well-known among scientists.”

I am truly astonished to discover that you apparently hold no one to be of account who is found in a philosophy department (or in a encyclopedia of philosophy?). Really?! Scientists are held to be of no account if they are associated with Philosophy?

I did a quick check on a few names in my Oxford Companion to Philosophy (new edition). Just a few. Imagine what I found:
Niels Bohr - Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics.
Nicolaus Copernicus - the first astronomer to formulate a scientifically-based heliocentric cosmology that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.
René Descartes - philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer.
Albert Einstein - theoretical physicist - widely considered one of the greatest physicists of all time.
Galileo Galilei - Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.
Sir Isaac Newton - an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher.
Max Planck - discoverer of quantum physics.
Aristotle - Greek philosopher and scientist.

Apparently, none of these worthies fit your definition of “influential or well-known among scientists.”

OK. Thanks for that insight.

I will point out that your link to the Popper bio bit goes to the Stanford philosophy department. That does not support the hypothesis that Popper is influential or well-known among scientists. Out of curiosity, I went back and checked the indices of various textbooks: Molecular Biology of the Cell, Genes IV, Cell, Physics, Genetics, Biochemistry, etc. In none of them did I find mention of Popper. True, not all of them mention names in the indices, but even among those textbooks that index scientists by name, I did not find Popper mentioned. Then I went to PubMed and did a search on popper, karl, which returned 72 items, of which 9 (12.5%) were articles having Popper, HH, as an author and were therefore unrelated to the subject of my search.

So much for the contention that Popper is either well-known or influential among scientists.

Gee, that was fun.

Let's play auto-authenticating Darwinist.

Popper is the missing link: but we wouldn't EXPECT to find any direct evidence of him in the literature, anymore than we would necessarily find the changes in the funding/regulatory environment which drive paradigm shifts in the sciences, within the intellectual "fossil record" which is the peer-review literature.

Or, to take the opposite tack:

How many of the peer-review articles mention Barack Hussein Obaama (whose predilictions and fancies drive the direction and scope of academic funding)?

So much for your theory that Obaama is well-known or influential among scientists.

QED

Cheers!