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by metaphorhacker 1840 days ago
You're cheating with the non-obvious bit. That's not at all what makes something science. Also the falsifiablility criterion is far too strict for much of biology and many others. Many if not most of the facts of botany or zoology are observational and only non-obvious in the sense that nobody bothered to look. Much of taxonomy is not very falsifiable and can only be said to be correct with respect to its own assumptions.

If you were a Martian scientist studying human culture by observation, noting things like people congregating in certain places and marking pieces of paper results in changes in who goes to a building far away would be nothing but trivial. But we already know all of that, so it feels and actually is useless as knowledge.

Also, there are very useful models in history when it comes to use of energy and resources - like Ian Morris's - that very much add something non-obvious, falsifiable and are probably correct. Just not very predictive on any scale under 500 years or so - but then again neither is natural selection.

1 comments

Non-obvious is necessary to avoid appending "and also the sun rises in the east and sets in the west every day" to every prediction to get it to satisfy the other three. That a fact is observational does not make it non-scientific. I have no problem calling a description of a human cell science.

I'd also add that you absolutely do not need 500 years to verify natural selection, see e.g. this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8