The theory of evolution will never be proven correct. Neither will general relativity, germ theory, plate tectonics, or any other established scientific framework. According to the 20th-century philosopher of science Karl Popper, this is not a flaw, a limitation, or a hedge. It is the basic structure of how scientific knowledge works.

Popper, writing in the 1930s, was concerned with what separates a scientific claim from a non-scientific one. He rejected the older view that science accumulates confirmations until a theory is securely established. Confirmations, he argued, were too cheap. Almost any theory can find some piece of evidence that fits it. The question that mattered was a different one: could the theory, in principle, be proven wrong?

He called this falsifiability. A scientific theory, on Popper's view, must make specific predictions that, if observed to fail, would refute the theory. The theory of evolution by natural selection predicts certain patterns in the fossil record and in genetic data. If a fossil rabbit appeared in Precambrian rock, the framework as we understand it would be in serious trouble. General relativity predicts the bending of light around massive objects, the slowing of time in gravitational fields, the existence of gravitational waves. If any of those predictions had failed when tested, the theory would have fallen.

Every successful experiment in science is, on this view, a failed attempt at refutation. Every confirmed prediction is an opportunity to disprove a theory that the theory survived. A theory that has survived many such attempts becomes well-supported, sometimes overwhelmingly. But it is never proved.

This reframes what scientists actually do. They are not accumulating final truths. They are exposing their best ideas to attack and reporting what survives. The theories that remain are simply the ones that nothing has yet broken.