"A given fact is explained scientifically only if a new fact is predicted with it....The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one." See pages 34-5 of The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 1978. - Wikipedia, under Imre Lakatos
And in his 1973 LSE Scientific Method Lecture 1[8]he also claimed that "nobody to date has yet found a demarcation criterion according to which Darwin can be described as scientific", thus implying Darwin's theory of evolution did not satisfy Lakatos's own criterion of at least predicting some novel fact(s), and so either it was pseudoscientific or else there was something wrong with Lakatos's criterion. - Wikipedia, under Imre Lakatos
The point here is that Darwinism does fulfill Lakatos' own criterion of being scientific because as it has been shown in another thread of Evolution/Darwinism that finding fossil of a rabbit in a certain layer from a certain age and in a certain place is very much a novel fact despite it has been buried in the ground for just that long. Every time we dig up new fossils they are new facts to us and such subject to the strenghtening/weakening/refutation of Darwinism.
This is clearly the case, the way I see it, that Lakatos' is on good ground with his criterion, but wrong in assuming Darwinism isn't subject to new findings dug out of the ground! Maybe he's been thinking that the fossils are so old that they can never represent something new, but this is clearly mistaken! There you are, Lakatos' being corrected in some respect at least! Cheers!
