Popper and complexity

Karl Popper distinguished between falsifiable and non-falsifiable theories. The first he regarded as scientific, and the last as non-scientific. Psychoanalytic theory, for example is non-falsifiable, and cannot be regarded as scientific. It might be some kind of an ideology. Yet this criterion seems somewhat naïve. Take for instance a theory of a multi-dimensional complex system. While in some dimensions it may be falsified, in others not. Since it is so complex you may never expose the falsifiable dimensions. Also Darwinism is non-falsifiable. It should be regarded as a model of evolution which served its purpose for some time, and now has to be augmented.

This blind belief in Neo-Darwinism is called by Houston Smith, Scientism which must be differentiated from science. http://www.uu.edu/centers/science/b...eview.cfm?ID=37

Biology is dominated by Scientism with some characteristics of the ideologies which dominated science in the USSR. They make you believe that mutations drive evolution and even cancer, which to my understanding is sheer nonsense. And all this happens in the strongest democracy on earth, the USA.


Back to complexity index