The American ecologist H. A. Gleason praised the hypothesis for being testable in the field of phytogeography but came to the conclusion that it could not account for migration data.
Skeptic Society founder and Skeptic magazine publisher Dr. Michael Shermer addresses this argument in his 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things, in which he points out that although tautologies are sometimes the beginning of science, they are never the end, and that scientific principles like natural selection are testable and falsifiable by virtue of their predictive power.