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> I mean many people may disagree with string theory, but it's hard for me to accept that it's science at all.

Science is a method, not a thing. I think most scientists, including those looking into string theory, would agree that the hypothesis is not science. It's a hypothesis. Maybe not even that, depending on whether or not you think it's falsifiable. But either way, it's an intriguing idea that scientists are looking at. That's a legitimate part of the process as well.

I always cringe when I hear evolution brought up as some invented method or mere developmental happenstance. It's a cold, unavoidable consequence of variation, selection and inheritance, in the absolutely most general way possible.

The universe evolves, life just found a way to make it quicker. Then we invented sexual dimorphism to make several selections within a single generation. Our human intelligence allows us to evolve ideas at an even faster rate.

The effects of evolution are in the realms of science, but evolution itself is the superstructure science, and anything else, has "evolved" in. It's time.

I think the strongest argument for evolution is it's the simplest approach that could possibly work.

Or, using backward reasoning, what would be the simplest possible way to achieve life as complex as a human? Evolution.

I don't agree it's the simplest. Creationism is actually simpler and that's why it's appealing to so many people. To be clear, I don't support Creationism, I'm just counter arguing.

I suppose it may seem simpler because we tend to anthropomorphize god, so "god simply snapped his fingers and everything came into existence" angle doesn't sound too complicated.

But then you start asking questions like where did god come from and why did he do what he did and the simplicity starts to fall apart.

Really, the moment the words "there's an omnipotent being that..." are uttered, simplicity goes out of the window.

Am I misunderstanding something about falsifiability? In principle, evolution can be falsified by observing no incremental development of species over time.

Falsifiability just means there's some possible way for it not to be true?

He thought it was untestable because it was based on a series unique one time unrepeatable events in the distant past.

Parts of the theory like Mendelian genetics are testable but on the whole... Evolution happens so slowly that we can't observe it or test it in a lab.

To me it seems like with Popper inquiry into how species came to be can never fit into science. It's a much narrower view than what we commonly understand as science today.

Of course evolution is falsifiable, as are falsifiable the big bang theory and the iron kernel theory.

To falsify a theory does not require to reproduce it in a lab. It means that the theory predicts something that you can actually observe, or not observe and thus disprove it.

For instance, we can falsify the theory like this: let's grow bacteria and subject them to some poisonous chemical. The theory predicts that, after many generations, if the colony survive then it should become resistant to that poison.

Here is an example of a theory that is not falsifiable: after they die, people's souls go to a place that is impossible to observe when you are alive.

Falsifiability is about "impossible to observe", not about repeatability.

This is just a factually incorrect claim by someone who clearly has no background in biology.

Evolution is frequently observed in the lab, particularly in organisms the reproduce quickly and prolifically as in most microorganisms. You might want to google "antibiotic resistance", which is literal evolution creating a public health hazard.

Evolution has withstood well over a century of experiments. It's the inevitable consequence of the facts of inheritable mutations and natural selection. Biology doesn't even make sense without it.

" by people who study philosophy of science. The consensus, which I agree with, is that it doesn't refelct how science atually works and "

Science 'works' today by p-hacking and data falsification.

I'm not sure that we should consider current practices an argument against a quality threshold.

Aren't you mixing two distinct things here?

I think you're right to identify two distinct things in the air, but it's the other guy doing the mixing. What science is and the extent to which that is approximated in practice are indeed two things. Neither is inherently more real or true than the other, or necessarily more right, depending on the context.

But I take this particular context to be about Sagan's comments on distinguishing truth from "baloney" via science by expressing principles that best express the scientific ideal. I don't take that to be "corrected" by appealing to science as practiced, which is where the mixing up of the two comes in.

I think there's a subtlety which isn't implicit in what you say. There is the ideal of science - which I think there's a case to be made that it's not something that can be fixed, but constantly evolves - and the practice.

But I think there's also a separate distinction between good faith and successful enough attempts to do science, and people just gaming the system. The fact that there's plenty of the latter must be acknowledged (in fact, I think the people who discovered this current set of issues and made a big deal of it are from the same group of academics as the ones abusing this loophole, and also, it's likely to be a perennial problem), but the former also exists and is not the same as the abstract ideal you bring up.

I'm not sure I would characterize Sagan's system here as specifically best expressing the scientific ideal. I think it's a great list to think carefully about to help with clear thinking, but I'm not sure applying the label of 'science' to all these points is the right way to think about them, although I'm not sure it isn't either.

Perhaps you meant to day "science doesn't work by p-hacking and data falsification". The great thing about science is that it involves a process of building models and hypotheses, and then running experiments to produce results that support the models and hypotheses. To the extent that p-hacking and data falsification produce results that are not correct, longer term they will have a difficult time distorting our understanding of the underlying phenomena. Short-term, certainly they can be distracting, but we care about reproducibility because scientists are constantly trying to reproduce (possibly by building on older) results. Results that cannot be reproduced do not contribute to science.