“And who is Karl Popper? Is he some great biologist, who discovered some seminal concepts of biology that help to shape the study of biological science as we practice it today”
Spirited: Considering that what takes place in the unseen dimension, that is the mind, always precedes the spoken and written word and every action-—including yours-—then Karl Popper is important both as a philosopher and as an honest man.
Honesty is in very short supply in certain departments of the so-called ‘scientific’ community, evolutionary biologists in particular.
Like ancient pagans who superstitously studied sheep entrails for signs today’s biologists superstitiously study slime-mold colonies for knowledge about themselves. And just like Greece’s ancient nature philosophers-—the scientists of their time-— who taught that in other lives they had been females, trees, fish and other such nonsense their modern counterparts proclaim themselves to have been worms, fish, and apes in their former lives.
Evolutionists—including you-— confuse their religious cosmogony with real science. Though Karl Popper preferred the evolutionary cosmogony to the special creation cosmogony he was at least honest enough to admit that evolutionism is a cosmogony rather than empirical science.
exDemMom, Karl Popper is notorious for his observation (paraphrased) that the more a theory withstands attempts at falsifying it, the more confident we can be in the theory - and conversely, theories which cannot be falsified are not trustworthy. In today's lingo, we would call such theories "just so" stories.
Herein is the great difference between disciplines.
In the "historical" sciences like archeology, anthropology, Egyptology, evolution biology - the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Theirs are "just so" stories based on spotty evidence in the historical record.
In the "hard" sciences like physics and chemistry, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Their theories are subject to empirical tests, observations and falsification attempts (Popper.) Indeed, the more attempts to falsify a theory that are made and fail - the more confident we are in the theory.
However, our greatest confidence stems from the discipline of mathematics (not a science) where the observations are subjected to mathematical "proofs."
And for me, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences (Wigner) is like God's copyright notice on the Cosmos.
Click here for more recent observations about that unreasonable effectiveness.
In particular, string theorists Hirosi Ooguri and Cumrun Vafa discovered that the number of complex topological structures that are formed when many strings interact is related to the Jones polynomial. Furthermore, the leading string theorist Ed Witten demonstrated that the Jones polynomial affords new insights in one of the most fundamental areas of research in modern physics, known as quantum field theory.
The lesson from this very brief history of knot theory is remarkable. First, it was the active effectiveness of mathematics that came into play. Physicists needed a model for the atom, and when knots appeared to provide the appropriate tool, a mathematical theory of knots took off. When a better mathematical model (in the form of the Bohr atom) was discovered, mathematicians did not abandon knot theory. Driven only by their curiosity, they continued to explore the properties of knots for many decades. The mere possibility of understanding the properties of knots and the principles that govern their classification was seen by most mathematicians as exquisitely beautiful and essentially irresistible. However, then came the surprising passive effectiveness of mathematics. Unexpectedly, the Jones polynomial and knot theory in general turned out to have wide-ranging applications in string theory.
What makes this story even more striking is the following fact. Recall that Thomson started to study knots because he was searching for a theory of atoms, then considered to be the most basic constituents of matter. By a remarkably circular twist of history, knots are now found to provide answers in string theory, our present-day best effort to understand the constituents of matter! So knot theory emerged from an attempt to explain physical reality, then it wandered into the abstract realm of pure mathematics—only to eventually return to its ancestral origin. Isn't this absolutely amazing?
For instance, the geologists who disagreed with the orthodox "just so" consensus story of Egyptology in reference to the age of the Sphinx were treated horribly by them. How dare they dispute the "just so" consensus story?!
Ben Stein's "Expelled" exposed such orthodoxies and how people who questioned the "just so" stories were treated. And in response, Stein himself is held up to ridicule. How dare he question our ethics?!
What childishness in the historical sciences!
If they were "hard" sciences, each attempt to falsify would be embraced as yet another opportunity to increase confidence in the theory.
I have much more confidence in mathematics and physics theories than in any "just so" story from a historical science discipline.
God's Name is I AM.