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Opening words are "There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience [...]" Instantly wrong. Reproducibility and testable predictions are

• thanatropism 7y ago
  Darwin's "On the origin of the species" meets neither.
  • tempguy9999 7y ago
    An actual reply instead of a no-op downvote, thanks. Ok then, why does it not? I've not read it but this from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species ) "It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation." There is a further section that presents facts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#Summary_of_Darwin%27s_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#Summa...) which is a bit long to quote here. So, are you saying OTOOTS presents evidence but not the necessary reproducability, in which case I may agree, and the book is not scientific theory but a precursor to one? Or something else?
• analog31 7y ago
  Galileo's heliocentrism was unfalsifiable. As I understand it, the Church fathers were willing to accept a compromise view, that the planets go around the sun, and the sun around the earth. Galileo could propose no empirical test for his view that the sun is at the center. Such a test would have to wait for Newton, and then it became apparent that neither the sun nor the earth were necessarily the center.
  • tempguy9999 7y ago
    Well, from memory the church believed everything revolved around the earth. Galileo found the moons of jupiter clearly did not. This falsified the church's belief, or would have though they reportedly refused to look through the telescope. Unfalsifiability of heliocentrism... I'll take your word for it, point accepted.
    • analog31 7y ago
      As it turns out, the story about refusing to look through the telescope is a myth. Galileo came under fire from lower officials who may have used that rhetoric. The church hierarchy was coming under political pressure for being "soft on heresy" if you will, in the wake of the Reformation. But the astronomers at the Vatican actually bought a telescope from Galileo, and confirmed his observations. And the Church Fathers at least claimed that they were willing to change their beliefs in the face of evidence. Apparently, Tycho Brahe had proposed a model where the planets go around the sun, and the sun around a stationary earth. This satisfied the telescopic evidence without introducing new problems such as why everything doesn't just get flung off the earth. I figure Galileo took his theory as far as it could be taken in his time, and it became more than just an interesting philosophical debate because of what we might now call the "geo-political" climate of the day. An amusing factoid is that Galileo had terrible eyesight, and his telescopes actually worked quite badly, so the observational work he did was difficult.
      • tempguy9999 7y ago
        Thanks for a comprehensive answer, clearing up some misconceptions etc. Much appreciated.