Definition of "handwaving" [handwaving]

• Waving the hands. (adjective)
• Pertaining to empty gesturing, with little substance behind it; vague. (adjective)
• Frantic or conspicuous gesturing (during an argument etc.), especially as contrasted with a lack of underlying substance or meaning; empty gesturing. (noun)
• Third-person singular simple present indicative form of handwave. (verb)

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• "It really undermines confidence in science if people are always being subjected to what we call handwaving arguments that all complexity had to have had an incremental origin."
• "A shitload of historical accounts of what was happening in Greenland several thousand miles to the south and a lot of airy handwaving is irrelevant."
• "I mean, there are works which use real science rather than handwaving, works in which the handwaving is indistinguishable from hokum, works which treat hokum as if it were real science, and works which don't actually "rationalise" at all."