Scientific theories are not "proven", that is not how science works. All theories are always and forever open to falsification. The scientific attitude is one of eternal doubt. "Proof" is something that only exists in the realm of pure math.
the "extreme skepticism" you claim the OP has seems more like a cautionary statement about avoiding the extreme assumption that a scientific theory can be "proven"
i think the OP is correct here; assuming evolutionary theory can be "proven" is a risky thing to say in a research article
And Einstein definitely falsified Newton with the famous experiment with the eclipse and with more correctly showing Mercury's orbit, both of which contradicted fundamentally with Newton. Newton is an extraordinary breakthrough, and still useful as a model, but our understanding is no longer Newtonian. And, finding a way to enrich our understanding of physics even further means finding ways to falsify parts of einstein and quantum mechanics to provide the foundation for an even deeper understanding.
As your link puts nicely: "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Will a future experiment disprove it though? Of course not. But could one? Sure. There's an important distinction.
Also, we could end up redefining what we mean by a mountain, or come to some scientific consensus that somehow redefines mount Everest as not a mountain or something. I know that's not in the spirit of the question you posted (Pluto may be declared to not be a planet, but nothing actually changed and it doesn't know we put it in a different bucket). The height could be redefined, etc. All that is super nitpicky and of course, I'm being a bit unreasonable in this response, there will not be any experiment that disproves its existence. But there still could. In the binary of is there any possibility however minuscule or not, the coin lands on the side of there is a possibility.
The important point is falsifiability works as a tool here that actually helps continuously support the mountain's existence. If it was impossible to falsify and you could not conduct experiments where you would be able to evaluate whether or not the mountain is actually there, you'd have no way of being actually sure. One experiment is just looking at it. You could not see anything and falsify it, but because it's a testable hypothesis, you have run an experiment providing more evidence for its existence. It's why non-falsifiable statements are looked down on science. If it wasn't possible for a future experiment to disprove the existence of the mountain, many or all scientists would say it's either a meaningless question or a question of faith instead.
Cool! That’s an interesting idea. I could see particular attributes of DNA being corrected, but How would a molecular basis for inheritance be disproven? After all, we see the molecule on microscopy, we modify it, etc. A dis-proof would have to remain consistent with all of that. What would that look like?
So it could be disproven, but will it? No. It definitely exists. But could it? Yep, that's how we know it exists in a scientific context. It's a bit counterintuitive, but it's the language of science. You see it in how physicists talk about discoveries - how many sigma they are. That's basically saying how likely it is the null hypothesis (sort of the falsification of the discovery) is true - and there's a point where it's so low (5 sigma traditionally) that it is considered "discovered." But that discovery is qualified with the chance that it's falsifiable.
I don't know if that was a clear explanation - if not let me know so I can try clarifying. It was something that took me a while to wrap my head around - that it's only demonstrable if falsifiable, but it's a core part of a lot of scientific theory today
For everyone who is earnest though - discoveries (even the earth being round) are only accepted until they're disproven, and there have been widely accepted theories that have been disproven in the past - like how relativity blew holes in Newtonian understandings.
And, of course, Einstein’s theory absolutely did falsify Newton’s. I’m not aware of any epistemology or terminology within which you can claim that he didn’t.
For example, Newton's Principia isn't wrong. Newton's gravity is just a lower-resolution photo than Einstein's; a first-order approximation to Einstein's second-order.
And the day will come (or so Brian Greene et al. hope) when Einstein's general theory of relativity will be "falsified", and so on, because any human interpretation of reality is necessarily that: an interpretation.
Theories just get more "granular" in the depth of their answers.
In the same way in the future we might discover that what we know about DNA is wrong
Or maybe not
We'll never know for sure
We only know that we approximated our knowledge of it at the best of our current understanding of it
Other half: it's a little tiring to be hyper rational and pedantic all the time.
True, but one should not expect careful use of language from phys.org. They are trying for more clicks, not accuracy.
But evolutionary theories are so close to pure math (ie., they assume so little empirical knowledge) that it does happen once in a while to have some aspect of them proven on the literal sense.
Every scientific theory has this thing where a complex conclusion is proven to follow from a simpler set of hypothesis. It just tends to happen more often with Evolution.
Edit: On the old text it wasn't clear I agree on this case.
They have to model how the natural and artificial barriers in each environment produce subpopulations that are isolated enough to produce subspecies. And compare the simulations of the models with the data of real mammal species to see if they have similar results. This is not so close to pure math.
and saying you've "proved" something about natural events is probably bad practice
In addition, different fields have different standards and methods for what qualified as evidence: for instance, mathematicians want nothing short of absolute proof - that's a given. But biologists are more from Missouri: they don't care that a theory is 'proven', they want to 'see' it [1]. For this reason they put very little trust in simulations no matter how advanced they are. On the other hand, they don't care that much about the mathematical rigor of the tools they use as long as it works out in the end and can be readily confirmed with something you can 'see'.
[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works
[1] Think of it as a 'constructive' view of evidence: everything must be explicit. For instance, if you want to show that trait X is 'genetic' you need to point out an explicit genetic mechanism and show it in action in model organisms. If you want to show that mechanism Y happens in one's cells you ideally need some microscopy to show Y happening live before your eyes, etc.
On the other hand, practicing scientists consider Popper's falsification one of the great unifying themes guiding scientific research.
Though perhaps not as well-known, Popper's approach towards falsification of probabilistic claims is also a great read.
Isn't this, along with and maybe encouraging p-hacking, a major cause of the non-reproducability crisis? Scientists hunting out supporting evidence instead of showing their theories don't easily break?
I'd say to the extent that this behavior contributes to the reproducibility crisis, it has more to do with not backing that exploration with rigorous experimentation.
But more to the point, I'd argue that the lack of funding and publish-or-perish atmosphere has more to do with it. Academics don't necessarily publish because the results are noteworthy, but because they have to, regardless of the robustness of their methodology.
The way I read it, it really dates back to Hume and the problem of induction. Until we have a Final Theory to hand, we never really know anything. That is a statement of epistemology. But science can't proceed on that basis: people make decisions on where to focus their efforts, and not all hypotheses are equally worth considering. That is a statement of scientific pragmatism, and those two fields don't overlap as much as we'd like them to.
Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way. Nor is it helpful for epistemological anarchists to insist that grants committees never really know and therefore really should fund astrology. The question of how scientists actually work is an important one, but it's a separate question from what TRVTH actually is -- even though scientists would like to believe otherwise. They're not as close as they think.
It isn't helpful for anyone and we have very concrete examples of that to hand: Anti-vaxxers love to point out stuff like Vioxx, but never say a damn thing about all the drugs and therapies which are helpful, do much more good than harm, and which are "proven" to work for all practical intents and purposes. Being unwilling to attack stuff like anti-vaccine nonsense head-on because of some abstract epistemological nonsense kills people. There's no upside to that.
Saying "Nothing is absolutely certain, therefore it is absolutely certain that we know nothing" is bad enough. Actually believing it is dangerous in direct proportion to how much of a hand you have in shaping policy. The bus driver might believe in utter epistemological nihilism, but they'd better not veer into oncoming traffic just the same.
They get to be anarchic, as long as you can't prove otherwise -- and "prove" in the mathematical sense, not the scientific one. All it costs you is paper, pencils, and the price of a trash can. (Which they never use.) If you shut down the line of reasoning just because other people are incredibly, dangerously stupid, you're going to have to shut down pretty much everything.
The philosophy of science is an established field that is hundreds of years old and includes pretty serious thinkers like Kant, Popper, Kuhn, and quite a few others. Ignore it at your own peril.
https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=philosop...