'Daylight Origins Society' reading material

Neither Popper nor any of the scientists mentioned above could be accused by evolutionists as having any bias in favour of supernatural creation. But perhaps even more to the point is an admission by one of the world's leading proponents of organic evolution that the hypothesis is untestable. S.J. Gould admitted in 1986 that evolution relies heavily upon inference and not on "steel balls rolling down inclined planes in a laboratory." ¹² Nevertheless, he criticized creation scientists who claimed that evolution was not part of empirical science.

In 1992, when Gould was teaching biology, geology, and the history of science at Harvard University in the United States, he wrote a hypercritical (and most unfair) review of Professor Phillip E. Johnson's book, Darwin on Trial. ¹³ In that review Gould claimed that Johnson held "a narrow and blinkered view of science," because Johnson had claimed that Darwin had "started his theory on the wrong road" by never proposing an experimental test for it. ¹⁴

Gould, however, admitted that

In trying to support his claim that evolution was, nevertheless, science and not metaphysics (in this context, pseudoscience), Gould argued that Darwin's methodology brought his theory within the ambit of natural science. He claimed that Darwin

What Darwin actually did was to search for circumstantial evidence, from which he attempted to draw inferences in favour of his hypothesis. No small part of the "evidence" (for example, the "horse series" and "vestigial organs") can now be shown to have been misconceptions, while his prediction that transitional forms would be found when the fossil record was more fully explored has been refuted.

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¹² Reported by Christopher Joyce in "Genesis Goes On Trial" (republished in Weekend Australian: 27/28 December 1986).
¹³ See endnote 1 above.
¹⁴ S.J. Gould, "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge," in Scientific American (July 1992), p. 194.
¹⁵ Gould, ibid.