What are ways to falsify this? Theories are rarely presented with how they can be falsified. When a theory is presented, it is presented in the positive, meaning it states what it is trying to prove. It is not stated with all the ways to disprove it which could be infinite.

You're right that there is a difference between scientific theories which try to explain historical phenomena (e.g. geology, evolution, and cosmology), and those which establish universally valid laws.  We can't run evolution in reverse the way we can, say, collide two subatomic particles.

However, there are millions of ways that evolutionary theory could have been falsified.  JBS Haldane famously gave the example of "fossil rabbits in the Precambrian" (i.e. from before life began on land) -- they don't exist.  

The molecular evidence of evolution could have failed to match the fossil evidence from paleontology, but it did not.  

The radioactive dates assigned to fossils could have been inconsistent with evidence from geological sediments -- it wasn't.

I could go on, but my point is that it's better to think about real ways that scientists have tested a theory than worry about the abstract concerns of philosophers -- they've spent centuries merely catching up with the practice of science.

every day of our lives, however slowly. That's about as good a test of it as one can imagine. We don't reproduce granite in a lab in order to prove how it was formed, we merely observe the ongoing process.

" If only it were more carefully handled with regard to this in the science classroom."

Even if this were true, it would have no bearing on whether the theory of evolution is scientific -- the falsifiability of the theory of evolution is well established in both the scientific and philosophy of science literature.

And open up your paleontology book.  The stratigraphic record, butressed by structural and isotope geology, provides some pretty profound support to the concept of evolution via the theory of natural selection.

This is totally wrong.  Evolution, i.e. the set of ideas that are conventionally implied by the term in common speech, is an easily falsifiable theory.  Cores have been dug all over the planet.  The first one that turns up a pre-Cambrian rabbit will kill evolution.  Meanwhile, consider it well-tested.

Evolution could be placed into serious question by a replicable miracle. If under defined laboratory conditions, in a contained environment without living precursors, God can be invoked to spontaneously generate a complex life-from, repeatedly, in various labs, then — while it wouldn't disprove evolution in other instances — it would well indicate that evolution is not the only story.

Presuming for the sake of argument "God," either God can do this, or not. If God can do this — which is the implicit claim of the Creationist crowd — then you have to make some theological excuse for why he doesn't. Perhaps our laboratories don't know how to invoke Him effectively? If that's the case, then we should work on how to pray better. But who can teach that? Any Creationist leader who can't even pray effectively enough to get God to generate new examples of complex life from nothing is not the one to teach our scientists how to pray, obviously.

Or maybe we have to allow the excuse of "God could do it but He doesn't want to." So you posit a God who for some reason wants us to believe He can do it, but doesn't want that badly enough to actually cooperate in a laboratory to prove His powers. That's like the child who wants us to believe he's gifted but won't work in school.

There's an historically-recent notion that God doesn't want to be provable by science, since somehow that would undermine the value of faith. That notion only came into vogue with the failure of science to prove God. All of those at the cusp of modern science, from Newton to Descartes and beyond, were firm in their belief that science would prove the existence and nature of God. Faith in proof and faith in God were the same thing.

Well, faith in proof has proved of lasting power; faith in God we can at best make excuses for, as having some psychological value despite the proofs of science demonstrating that the greater part of most religions, taken at all literally, are flat-out false. We can still have religion along with science, but only if religion yeilds to proof. We must return to the faith, at the root of science, that reality, when openly explored and tested, will not deceive us.

To not believe in reality, that is, to believe that reality lies, while the fantasies written up in certain old books — internally contradictory as they are — somehow do not, that's batshit fucking insane at this point in history. We've got a major mental health crisis on our hands. Something like half the population of the most nuclear-armed nation is batshit fucking insane, and even thinks their God might be happier if they just destroyed our planet.

And that's why it's so important they not be enabled to use our schools to recruit youth into their cultish madness.

Wouldn't heliocentricity be "not scientific" the same way?  Is heliocentricity falsifiable?  If so, how?

In any case it's absolutely not true that evolution is unfalsifiable.  Every fossil found, every new species identified, every strand of DNA sequenced, and every mutation observed is a test of evolutionary theory.  It stands up to every test.

How to falsify it?  Find a fossil of a griffon (i.e. a bird/mammal intermediate).

Bang, right there you've falsified a major section of the accepted evolutionary history of vertebrates, because mammals and birds are expected to have come from different branches of early reptiles, and there should be no ancestor which shares characteristics of both.

Other people have commented on fossil rabbits in the Precambrian although that one isn't clear: it's entirely possible to believe an animal that looked like a rabbit might have evolved from a now-extinct lineage that had most of its fossil record destroyed--highly unlikely, mind you, but theoretically possible.

An Albertosaurus with a human femur in its stomach would be more along the lines of evidence since we have a much better grasp on the more recent past so we know that case totally contradicts what we know now.

Another example of disproof would be, say, a mammal giving birth to a reptile, or vice-versa (without scientific intervention in an experiment, of course).  That sort of massive change contradicts evolutionary theory, among other things.

I think that there are several different factors at play in your perception of evolution.

I will initially sound backwards like I'm from some swamp land but evolutionary theory as sometimes/often presented is not scientific. And by scientific I don't mean that it doesn't appeal to observation and traditional scientific measures (viz. Thomas Kuhn) because it obviously does. Rather it is presented in a way that offers up no sense of which observations could be made which would represent a falsification of that theory.

Sometimes it helps to separate them.

First, there is a problem with the quality of science education in general. The problem here is shoddy education, not evolution. A lot of what passes as science education is just a cataloging of dramatic examples presented as received wisdom with little or no contextual backgrounding in why that example is important or where it came from. There is often too much attention given to the final work product (conclusions) of science rather than the processes (evidence and reasoning on the evidence) from which the product emerged. In this sense your criticism is valid, but it is not unique to evolution. It is merely evolution's bad luck to be the only science who's validity is discussed in public these days.

Another problem peculiar to evolution is that it has two distinct aspects that are often mistakenly conflated. This leads to a lot of confusion.

The first aspect is the simplest and most direct: evolution is the change of gene frequencies in populations over time. Call this the process of evolution and it is accessible to test and inspection in labs, the field and elsewhere in the here & now.

The second aspect is the history of life on Earth which is a record of how the process of evolution has worked over time. Reconstructing lineages and understanding the process of evolution are clearly related, but very different things.

The nature and importance of the distinction can be illustrated by considering the fact that I can not find the graves of my ancestors going back more than three generations; I can't unequivocally reconstruct my lineage. Nevertheless, it would be foolish of me to argue from this, as a creationist might, that I had no great great great grand parents simply because I can't find any of their bones. And then to go on and conclude that my existence is therefore somehow miraculous is even sillier. Rather, my knowledge of the process of reproduction leads me to rationally conclude that I did have 32 great³ grand parents even though neither hide nor hair of any them is to be found anywhere on earth today.

Theories are powerful things and supposing that they are weak is probably the single most egregious conceptual blunders creationists make. A well tested and firmly established theory is nearly impervious to discordant evidence. The absence of any evidence of the existence of my deep ancestors is no impediment to me asserting their existence as fact. If somebody cracked the crypt of one of my putative ancestors and found a long dead cat instead of human remains, I wouldn't change my mind. If a large study revealed that 95% of living humans can't locate their great³ grand parents' remains, I still wouldn't change my mind. Creationists are oblivious to this asymmetry in the interplay of data and understanding. They delight in talking about supposed gaps in the fossil record, or the occasional erroneous reconstruction of some lineage or other, but all of that means nearly nothing with respect to the soundness of the theory of evolution.

Even the simple notion of "fact" is a slippery thing and is absolutely dependent on theory. You may think it is a simple, unassailable and concrete fact that some object is 2.3 meters long, but what is a meter? At first it was a defined as a fraction of the circumference of Earth (1/10,000,000^th of the meridian from the pole to the equator via Paris) and the definitive standard was later a platinum-iridium alloy bar of said length in the basements of standards bureaus. Nowadays a meter is defined as:

the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.

To know why you need a really good clock to measure how tall you are requires more than a little theory to understand and accept. The fact/theory dichotomy is largely overrated. Theories, ones held with high confidence, trump facts. It could be fairly said that without theories there can be no facts.

And if you can't really test a theory then it's not very scientific (in the sense that most scientists and philosophers of science adopt). If only it were more carefully handled with regard to this in the science classroom

Actually, nobody really knows how science works. It does, but nobody knows why. Yes, scientists will often refer to philosophers and philosophies of science, but few have read deeply into them and fewer still have thought deeply on what they read there and of those that have not many agree with what they read. In no observable instance have we been seen to follow the modes of behavior that philosophers have prescribed for us. So I doubt that science education can be improved by showing a correspondence between the science of evolution and how philosophers have declared science ought to be done. Science is more of a culture than it is a process. It can only really be learned by doing it. For example, read "Changing Order : Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice" by HM Collins, a sociologist of science.

considering that fat boy actually exploded, and welcomed in the new nuclear age

I think we can say it's a little more than an "Unprovable" theory

That's why they are called theories.

Heck, even the "Law of Conservation of Mass" and the atomic theory of matter which were the most fundamental principles in my branch of science (Chemistry) ended up being wrong. (As proven by atomic bombs, and subatomic particles.)

Every theory provides a model which explains the observed behavior of a system. Confusing this model with reality is common, but it is not correct. Reality doesn't change. Models frequently need to be revised to reflect new data.

Ultimately, science doesn't explore the true nature of the universe, it explains the observed behavior of the universe.

(On the other hand, my dabbling in the philosophy of science is based on personal experience, and discussions and readings from other scientists. I haven't read much from philosophers on the subject.)

There is only perception and perceived reality.

Science is an attempt to separate the likely from the fantastic.

I do not personally question the theory of evolution. It is still a theory and taught as such, so it must reasonable still be treated as such.  

ID is so far off base, no reasonable person would accept it as a refutation of evolution.

You are saying that events occur which demonstrate that one organism can evolve into a different organism over time.   I agree.  

The ID proponents are the defendants here.

this is closer to the real problem, but more personally insulting for people pushing teaching creationism and the young earth.  Evolution as defined by Darwin has been modified and expanded and is a real and vital science.  Refighting the big debates between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce is perhaps a fun academic exercise but we are so past that.  It is like saying the sound barrier is dangerous when we have people who have been to the moon.  For crums sake- we have sequenced the darned genome of humans and chimps.  It is online!  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Compare the two and tell me we aren't related and the whole 6000 year old earth makes any sense at all (Fingers in ears: la la la I am not listening).

Compare the two and tell me how intelligent design makes sense of all the junk in the human AND chimp genomes being virtually the same "junk" (non-coding) DNA?  

As to the main thread, it is clear they are funneling local church money into the curriculum in this little school district in PA and lying about it and disguising it.  Because only churches embrace intelligent design and want to teach it in school. Commandments about false witness seem appropriate to bring up in this context.  

A lot of times science books start out with a history of views of an issue.

Actually, I think my daughter's 5th grade teacher did something really interesting, which is when they started their social studies curriculum which looked at human evolution, they did a unit on origin myths and students could discuss their religious/cultural beliefs and traditions. Then the idea of what a scientific approach, as opposed to a faith-based or tradition based one, is was introduced. Not that you could get away with that in most schools, but I thought it was very powerful especially since her classmates included everything from Pentacostal to atheist.

We prop up the deficit by mastering the arcane "science" of Alchemy?

Flood the world market with gold, transmuted from base materials via the intelligently designed philosophers stone.

day though, you may receive a sudden and inexplicable tax rebate, or find a lottery ticket in a gutter that wins.  Isn't that the essential tenets of The Church of Sub-Genius?

And you are wiser for it.

As a fundamentalist subgenius, I know these lessons well.  Hey, you could send me money, and I wouldn't write back either!