Hmm.. good comment. Not how I understood the paper but I'm willing to accept that I could be wrong. I agree that we can't generalize from trends but I felt he w

Hmm.. good comment. Not how I understood the paper but I'm willing to accept that I could be wrong. I agree that we can't generalize from trends but I felt he went a bit further and questioned the validity of any theory that makes assumptions of the past that can't be proven regardless of how good it is at predicting the future or describing the present. Darwin assumed that because he could find evidence that some animals had evolved from a recent common ancestor all animals evolve from some ancestor (roughly). Because I understood the paper as I did I thought it would be a good example. Darwin made assumptions about the past that he couldn't prove (in his time) and used that to explain the now and predict the future. Today we have plenty of proof that he was correct but back then not so much. He made an educated guess based on observations and provided ways of proving him wrong. A good method in my view. To me it seemed like the author of this paper would have told Darwin to get a time machine to prove his theory or be silent instead of trying to disprove the theory. Anyways, thanks for the comment. Seems there's more to this thing then I thought so I'll study it some more.