 Of course, in real life nothing is ever that simple, and Arkansas was certainly not the end of matters. One of the key issues in the trial was less theological or scientific, but philosophical. (Paradoxically, the ACLU had significant doubts about using a philosophical witness and only decided at the last minute to bring Michael Ruse to the stand. As it happens, as the judge’s ruling shows, the philosophical testimony proved crucial.) Look again at the fifth of the judge’s criteria for what makes for good or genuine science. The Creationists had started to refer to the ideas of the eminent, Austrian-born, British-residing philosopher  Karl Popper  (1959). As is well known, Popper claimed that for something to be genuinely scientific it has to be falsifiable. By this, Popper meant that genuine science puts itself up to check against the real world. If the predictions of the science hold true, then it lives to fight another day. If the predictions fail, then the science must be rejected – or at least revised. Popper (1974) himself expressed doubts about whether evolutionary theory is genuinely falsifiable and he rather inclined to think that it is less a description of reality than a heuristic to further study, what he called a ‘metaphysical research programme’ (Ruse 1977). The Creationists seized on this and argued that they had the best authority to reject evolution, or at least to judge it no more of a science than Creationism. (To his credit, Popper revised his thinking on Darwinian evolutionary theory and grew to see and admit that it was a genuine scientific theory; see Popper 1978).