So where does that state that common descent has been falsified?
(bolding mine) Please re-read this article. As it clearly states in the section you are referring to, it is the intial conception of macroevolution that has been found to be wrong, not macroevolution or any of the proposed mechanisms. That is a very big difference
I can just imagine the laugh the author of that article would have reading your interpretation!
Peace
Tim
I claimed that part of it was falsified. Here the author was defending the ability for macroevolution to be falsified. I did not say anywhere that it has been completely falsified.
Given all that I wouldn’t expect an all out admission here.
And in another post I wrote I will wait for more lines to be found.
Let us not put words into my mouth.
The section of the article I referred to was:
Falsifying macroevolution
Is macroevolution a testable hypothesis? Can it be falsified?
Antievolutionists try to make out that macroevolution is a tautology, the way they claim that natural selection is a tautology. The implication is that macroevolution cannot be tested and shown to be wrong, and therefore it is not science.
To clarify this, consider what it is that scientists test when they test a hypothesis. Let’s suppose that we are testing the idea that global warming is caused by a rise in CO2 in the atmosphere. There are two parts to this – one claim is that CO*2 causes the retention of solar and other heat, and the second is that this has happened in the past and is actually happening now. If you show that in a particular case global warming didn’t happen (say, in the period of the last interglacial), you haven’t thereby shown that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming, nor that it isn’t doing so
now. All you have tested is a particular case.
We can test a
particular claim of macroevolution. We can test, for example, if weasels are more closely related to red pandas than bears are (
Flynn and Nedbal 1998,
2000et al.). This is a test of a particular evolutionary
tree or scenario. It tests a historical reconstruction. If shown, on the basis of the evidence and the best data, to be wrong, then that history has indeed been falsified. But can we test the
idea of common descent? It is not possible to show that something never occurred, but it is very easy to show that where it ought to occur, it either has or it hasn’t. Science will not retain a bad idea when it is shown repeatedly not to explain what we have a right to expect it to explain (this is one reason why creationism was dropped from science back in the 1850s). If macroevolution persistently were shown to run counter to the data, then science would drop it and look for another solution.
Moreover, science has to an extent falsified the initial conception of macroevolution. The original idea was that evolution formed only tree-like patterns – species split like branches. A growing consensus has argued that both hybridisation (species recombining) and lateral genetic transfer (genes crossing the taxonomic boundaries individually or as part of symbiotic organisms that are taken into the “host” taxon’s cellular machinery) are more common than we had previously thought. Macroevolution of species is still regarded as the most common way that the diversity of life has developed, but the “tree” now has “vines” that hang across the branches of single celled organisms (Fig. 4).
Fig 4
So the
Common Descent Hypothesisas we might call the general idea, or the notion of
Descent with modification as Darwin called it in his correspondence, is tested every time a
particular hypothesis is tested.
When there are problems in enough phylogenies, then Common Descent may be rejected. So far, though, it is a very good first approximation, and the fact that revisions can be and have been made show that it is neither dogma, nor insulated from data.
