Neutralizing Popper--NCSE boilerplate

Karl Popper was one of the major philosophers of science in this century, and it is significant that he found a problem with Darwinism, and not surprising the Darwin propaganda machine has a problem with Popper. Throw in gleeful creationists exploiting this and the record that should be straight remains crooked.
Below is the NCSE (Propaganda Central) damage control. I can't speak for Popper, but one can see what he was driving at before he either backed down or changed his story for whatever obscure reasons unknown.
His point is, or should be, obvious, but unfortunately he stated the issue in terms of prediction in science, which is a less clear.
He is right, however: Evolution by natural selection is not a 'law of evolution' with predictive potential. This fact should alert us to the different character of evolutionary 'science'. The principles of this science would like to mimic physics, but can't, because the methodology for such a science must be cast from scratch, with new principles. This has NEVER been accomplished, fact, and not all the Nobel Prize nerds on the planet saying otherwise can change this fact. Look at someone like Prignone straining to push the limits with theories of self-organization. He didn't succeed either, and at least grasped the basic point. A science of evolution doesn't exist yet. Like the three (or a peck more) blind mice, the creationists dance away in the twilight zone.

However, the more general point, in relation to Popper's obvious reservations, is that Darwinian natural selection creates a 'metaphysical research program'. That dreaded phrase! Metaphysics, in a Kantian vein, arises when we project 'ideas of Reason' onto a void, unsupported by empiricism. That's the case with selectionist claims. Darwinism is a MRP because it makes metaphysical assumptions about organisms, and claims that those assumptions are supported by natural selection. The problem is that 'evolutionary events' in the critical zone have never been properly observed, and the whole game is up in the air.
Darwinism can't even define an organism, let alone produce a theory of their evolution. A lot more can be said here. But the dissent of Popper should have been a wake up call, but instead the snoozers groped in the night to turn off the alarm.
No matter how many times you point this out, Darwinists wriggle around the confusion, as in this material from the NCSE archive. Go through all their materials and you find the same 'talking point' blurbs, replicated without thinking.

Popper and Evolution
by Stephen G. Brush
Originally printed in NCSE Reports Winter 1993/Spring 1994, vols. 13:4/14:1, p. 29.

Popper and EvolutionStephen G. BrushInstitute for Physical Science and TechnologyUniversity of Maryland at College ParkIn connection with the discussion of Karl Popper's philosophy of science (Reports 13(1) and 13(3)), it should be recalled that this philosophy played a small but significant role in the creation-evolution controversy in the early 1980s, and it is still used by anti-evolutionists a decade later.Popper asserted that making testable (and thus potentially falsifiable) predictions of previously unobserved phenomena was a necessary condition for a theory to be called "scientific." This was known as the "falsifiability" criterion. Popper himself concluded that Darwinian evolutionary theory failed to satisfy that criterion so it was not a scientific theory but only a metaphysical research programme--a way of explaining what had already happened, not a theory that can predict what will happen in the future.There is an obvious flaw in the criterion, at least in the extreme version originally proposed by Popper: it excludes not just evolutionary biology but also historical geology and much of astronomy, even though these are recognized sciences. A more subtle objection is that even in testing theories that obviously are scientific, such as Einstein's general theory of relativity, scientists do not give any more weight to previously unknown phenomena (such as the bending of light by the Sun) than to deductions of known phenomena (such as the advance of the perihelion of Mercury).Popper reversed himself in 1978 and asserted that Darwinian theory is scientific. But the damage had been done; creationists used Popper's original statement to argue that evolution is not a science and hence does not deserve precedence over creationism in the classroom. For example, in 1982 a proposed "equal-time" law in Maryland argued that "evolution-science like creation-science cannot be ... logically falsified."In a society where the word "science" implies reliable knowledge and the authority that goes with such knowledge, lots of people (especially including creationists) want to grab that label, and many of us feel a strong need for an objective test or formula to distinguish between science and nonscience. Popper's falsification criterion once seemed to be the answer, but it was too simplistic. I don't think there is a single test that can capture the multidimensional nature of real science. At the same time we can insist on several factors that should be involved in judging theories: internal coherence, compatibility with other accepted theories, agreement with empirical evidence, etc. A careful reading of Popper's works shows that he advocated such a multifactor approach when he wasn't discussing the falsifiability criterion which made him famous.