You should have kept reading, and not simply stopped when you found a point you liked.
"I have changed my mind about the testability and logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation." - Popper, Dialectica.
I'm acquainted with his "recantation" and purposely ignored it.
Popper died at age 94. He spent his life writing about science (and politics). His earlier views on Darwinism being a metaphysical research program (rather than a testable scientific theory) are far more numerous, and far clearer. That he -- for some reason -- issued a "recantation" is interesting, but mainly curious. First, why not just say "I thought one way about it; now I think this way. Here's where I went wrong in my earlier thinking, and here are the facts that made me change my mind." But he doesn't say that. He says "I recant," and -- personally -- I believe that, like most "recantations" in the past (such as the one by Galileo) it was made under duress. An important, influential thinker, with dozens of position statements, doesn't just publish one essay and say "I recant."
So, I purposely omitted that Dialectica statement in my consideration of Popper because it really does not fit in with his life's work, not to mention his earlier statements. His recantation, which references an essay he wrote called "On Clocks and Clouds" is confused, and makes rather confusing reading.
Also, for the record, even if Popper did really change his position on this, it doesn't mean, of course, that he believed the conclusions of Darwinism (and Popper was an admitted atheist). A theory can be WRONG and still be classified as "scientific." The issue here was simply the status of Darwinism as a theory. "Phlogiston" theory of heat was a wrong theory, but a perfectly good scientific one.