On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Luke Weiger wrote:
> If by "not science" you mean "not sometimes almost certainly true," I don't
> know how you can think of yourself as a Darwinian. As Charles (Brown; not
> Darwin) noted, we sometimes are lucky enough to watch natural selection at
> work, but not very often, and not at all prior to the 20th century (unless
> you consider "artificial" selection to be a sort of natural selection).
>
> -- Luke
"not science" means speculation that is not systematically tested and verified by systematic observation. I think of it as a continuum: sociobiologists at one end, spinning stories, and cognitive psychologists (to pick one example) conducting carefully controlled experiments to test claims about memory processing at the other.
Darwin's somewhere in the middle of the not science/science continuum: no slight to him, but some of his ideas are difficult to test using scientific methods.
Miles