Evolution

I am engaged in a small debate in the comment section of this post. Somehow I am not making my point.

What I am trying to argue, independent of everything else, and regardless of it's validity, is that evolution can not make a strong claim at being science.

I am not claiming that it is wrong, but only that it is not science.

The reason, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t pass the test for the honorific "science". It is far too malleable and has little or no predictive power. And there is no reasonable test that might prove it false.

For example, in Newton vs. Einstein, there are many tests that can be done that demonstrate that relativity is a better theory that Newtonian mechanics and gravitation.

Evolution, by contrast, is framework built upon natural selection, with the plausible (and irrefutably true) axiom that a trait providing an advantage will "take over" as it were. On this unassailable fact, an enormous amount of speculation is built. Regardless of whether or not it's true, it's still speculation, not science. It may be the beginning of science, but if it doesn’t allow for testing, it’s not science.

Fitting the data is part of science, but only part. Intelligent Design (ID) can fit the data, but that doesn’t make it science either.

I wasn't trying to argue that ID is "just as scientific" and "just as much a theory" as evolution. No, I tried to argue that evolution is as unscientific as ID. Both are frameworks that can accommodate virtually any new data. An organism’s trait can always be attributed to natural selection (and, if need be, an environmental stress can be postulated that forced the adaptation) of it can claimed to be a result of design. Or even both.