Free Republic

When I was an undergraduate the philosopher I studied most carefully was Karl Popper, especially his writings on the evaluation of evidence and criteria to distinguish a genuine scientific theory from a false one. He made two key points. First, a theory must include the falsifiability principle. It must be susceptible to empirical tests and, if it fails to meet them, be scrapped. He gave as an example of a genuine theory Einstein's General Relativity of 1915. Einstein insisted that it must survive three practical tests, and if it failed any one of them be dropped as untrue. In fact...

About the strikingly successful proofs of Einstein’s “risky” or “counter-intuitive” predictions based on the relativity theorems, Karl Popper (http://www.geocities.com/healthbase/falsification.html) observed: “Now the impressive thing about this case is the risk involved in a prediction of this kind. If observation shows that the predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory is simply refuted. The theory is incompatible with certain possible results of observation, in fact with results which everybody before Einstein would have expected. This is quite different from the situation I have previously described, when it turned out that the theories in question were compatible with the most divergent...

Birthing the Culture War by: Bethany Stotts, September 11, 2007 Over the last half century, America has become embroiled in a culture war between so-called Open Society liberals and Reaganite conservatives. Authors David Horowitz and Richard Poe describe the Open Society in their book, “The Shadow Party,” as founded upon Karl Popper’s philosophy that “A truly open person never assumes that his beliefs are superior to someone else’s and never forgets his own fallibility.” According to Horowitz and Poe, George Soros then adopted this philosophy, founding the Open Society Institute. OSI describes its dedication to “support the rule of law,...

The recent ruling in Dover, Pa., against the mention of intelligent design in biology textbooks was a small cultural victory for science - not because intelligent design posed a genuine threat to the theory of evolution, but because the decision showed the public that there is an important difference between science and pseudoscience. In the wake of the trial, scientists are being criticized, even by their own colleagues, for working on anything that might be construed as pseudoscience - and string theory is drawing most of the heat. An intense controversy has erupted regarding the status of this potential "theory...

In an election in Pennsylvania this week, voters tossed out eight members of the Pittsburgh school board who wanted Intelligent Design theory to be taught alongside evolution in school. But should Intelligent Design -- the theory that living organisms were created at least in part by an intelligent designer, not by a blind process of evolution by natural selection -- be taught in public schools? In one way, the answer to this question is simple: if it's a scientific theory, it should; if it's not, it shouldn't (on pain of flaunting the Establishment Clause). The question, however, is whether Intelligent...

Billy and Sheila Canaan just wanted out of Baton Rouge. They didn''t expect to be bit players in a new movement to keep the Great Plains from emptying. Billy gave up a $90,000-a-year deputy sheriff's job for one that pays a third as much. Sheila kept slipping on the thick ice of a bitter Kansas winter and broke a rib. Son Clayton reluctantly started his senior year at a new high school. To their Cajun palates, Midwest cooking had all the zing of roasted cardboard. (Clayton keeps hot sauce in his locker.) So why Kansas, when other rural states offer...