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Comment by tempguy9999 | Hacker News Reader

Opening words are "There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience [...]"

Instantly wrong. Reproducibility and testable predictions are the distinctions.

Galileo's heliocentrism was unfalsifiable. As I understand it, the Church fathers were willing to accept a compromise view, that the planets go around the sun, and the sun around the earth. Galileo could propose no empirical test for his view that the sun is at the center.

Such a test would have to wait for Newton, and then it became apparent that neither the sun nor the earth were necessarily the center.

Darwin's "On the origin of the species" meets neither.

An actual reply instead of a no-op downvote, thanks.

Ok then, why does it not? I've not read it but this from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species )

"It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation."

There is a further section that presents facts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#Summa...) which is a bit long to quote here.

So, are you saying OTOOTS presents evidence but not the necessary reproducability, in which case I may agree, and the book is not scientific theory but a precursor to one? Or something else?

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