Popper, Karl falsification

Such discrepancies, in my opinion, reflect a lack of intellectual sophistication in the evaluation of experimental observations. Such an approach was basically known in ancient philosophy. In this century, it was developed and advocated in particular by (Sir) Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959, 1980). Very briefly it says that scientific hypotheses should be verified (experimentally or theoretically), but one should realize that corroboration (verification in Popper s terms) can never be safe against falsifications which, in contrast, can be definite. As discussed in an Interlude in the book on aromatic diazo chemistry (Zollinger, 1994, Chapt. 9), the human mind has a tendency for verification, and hesitates to search for falsification. 

The central tenets of the falsificationist philosophy of Karl R. Popper are reviewed in detail, and the way they do or do not apply to systematics and phylogeny reconstruction is analyzed. Cladistic analysis, cast in either maximum parsimony or in maximum likelihood approaches, is not compatible with Popperian falsificationism. The main reasons are the absence of a deductive link between a hypothesis of phylogenetic relationships and character distribution on a tree, which translates into the absence of the basic asymmetry of falsification versus verification. This sets Popper s philosophy of science apart from inductive systems. In cladistic analysis, falsification (disconfirmation) is symmetrical to verification (confirmation), which reveals an inductive and hence probabilistic background. The basic problem of systematics as an empirical science resides in character conceptualization and its critical evaluation. 

---