"Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense"
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Gould doesn`t swat the creationist objection so much as expose it as a category mistake dressed up as a talking point. By calling the charge "rhetorical nonsense", he refuses the polite, debate-club framing creationism often seeks: the idea that evolution is merely one "belief" facing another, and that science owes equal time to anyone who says the magic word "untestable". The phrasing is strategic. "Often charge" signals a familiar script, not a fresh critique; "properly scientific" borrows the language of gatekeeping to show who is really trying to police the boundaries of legitimacy.
The intent is twofold: defend evolutionary biology and defend the public meaning of "test". In everyday argument, "testable" gets flattened into "can you rerun it in a lab tomorrow?" Gould is pointing out that sciences like geology, astronomy, and evolutionary biology work through consilience: predictions, retrodictions, independent lines of evidence, and hypotheses that can be broken by new finds. Evolution makes risky claims about patterns in fossils, genetics, biogeography, and developmental biology; it wins because those patterns cohere in ways creationist accounts do not.
Context matters: Gould wrote as a public intellectual in America`s late-20th-century creationism battles, when legal and school-board fights turned "scientific" into a political weapon. His subtext is that the argument isn`t really about methodology; it`s about smuggling a religious conclusion into the classroom by discrediting the very standards that keep sectarian claims out. The snap of "nonsense" is a line in the sand: you don`t appease bad-faith skepticism by treating it as neutral inquiry.
The intent is twofold: defend evolutionary biology and defend the public meaning of "test". In everyday argument, "testable" gets flattened into "can you rerun it in a lab tomorrow?" Gould is pointing out that sciences like geology, astronomy, and evolutionary biology work through consilience: predictions, retrodictions, independent lines of evidence, and hypotheses that can be broken by new finds. Evolution makes risky claims about patterns in fossils, genetics, biogeography, and developmental biology; it wins because those patterns cohere in ways creationist accounts do not.
Context matters: Gould wrote as a public intellectual in America`s late-20th-century creationism battles, when legal and school-board fights turned "scientific" into a political weapon. His subtext is that the argument isn`t really about methodology; it`s about smuggling a religious conclusion into the classroom by discrediting the very standards that keep sectarian claims out. The snap of "nonsense" is a line in the sand: you don`t appease bad-faith skepticism by treating it as neutral inquiry.
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| Topic | Science |
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