And yet, because YOU can't see it, it automatically doesn't exist?
^ See, that's where I'm getting at here. If he told everyone he could see it too, they'd think he was pulling it out of his behind. EVEN THOUGH he couldn't see it, he found evidence for its existence. And then sought to research it, through which he obtained results, which covered every base at the time.
Back then, everything was qualitative...everything. He very well may have researched it quantitatively, if that was enough of a thing back then to fit properly into his discipline. It wasn't. So going against him because it wasn't "quantitative" is absolute BS, esp. considering that's how the sci community did things back then. That is, qualitatively. Through observation by the senses...only.
In fact, nearly all of Biology is qualitative in nature. I guess that means we should destroy the practice, since it uses the senses.
It's not only that his theory didn't have independently verifiable observations, it's that there are other competing theories that explain phenomenon better and without all that subjective hassle that his theory deals with. And how did he come up with results when he couldn't observe these things in the first place?
The kicker that made evolution powerful wasn't because it was qualitative. Darwin's work largely was. However, genetics came along and we could quantify evolution in terms of genes and DNA. So what used to be a qualitative discipline became quantifiable, we discovered the mechanism behind it that we could count, and so it became more powerful.
Seeing isn't always believing. That's why we turn it into numbers that we can agree on.
And dude, I'm a bio student. If anything, biology is increasingly quantitative and computerized. It's all about manipulating or identifying numbers, or different states as much as you can, when you do a microarray for example.