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With empirical observations it takes mountains of evidence to prove your case and just one piece of evidence to disprove it.
by jswinghammer 17y ago
With empirical observations it takes mountains of evidence to prove your case and just one piece of evidence to disprove it.
- gjm11 17y agoThat's rather an oversimplification in practice. "Just one piece of evidence" can almost always be explained in many, many different ways. Overturning an apparently well-established theory generally takes a substantial accumulation of contrary evidence, and preferably the appearance of a new and better theory. So, suppose someone found a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian. J B S Haldane notwithstanding, biologists would not abandon evolution, nor should they. They'd start looking at possibilities like fraud; previously unknown ways for things to get fossilized very rapidly; some screwup in their dating of the relevant bits of rock; and so forth. It would take a whole lot of fossil rabbits, and preferably some other evidence too, to make "evolution is all wrong" a better theory than those. That doesn't mean evolution is unfalsifiable; it means it's got a whole lot of evidence and arguments behind it, and overturning it would take a correspondingly large weight of evidence.