Anderson writes:
On the street, theories are held to be -little better than airy-fairy conjectures, whereas statements of fact are held to be true. But -- and this is key in coming to understand the “evolution is a fact … evolution is a theory” issue -- theories are not necessarily less certain than facts as is popularly thought. Facts are confirmed observations, not truth.
Facts do one job, theories quite another. Theories explain facts. They are models or maps or abstractions that make sense of data. Alfred North Whitehead pointed out that the genius of science is its twin concern with the particular (the facts) and the general (theory). If science were merely concerned with statements of fact then reality would be the best model of itself. Such a model would be useless to humans and biology would be “merely stamp-collecting”, as Lord Rutherford famously claimed.
The Thunderstick is dcat's normal source on matters scientific, so hopefully he will weigh in to remind folks of the difference between the common conception and the scientific meaning of "theory."
3 comments:
In all my years in science nothing has bored me more than the semantic arguments about what we call certain things. To me, and this won't nearly as elegantly put as I'm sure most of you history types would like, but a fact has been proven to be true, a theory has not. The speed of light is 3 x 10^8 m/s is a fact--there's no debating it. Eating vegetable cuts down your risk for cancer is a theory--it may have evidence to support it, but it's by no means proven. Where the gray area lies is how much evidence is needed to push a theory to the fact side. This is what drives me nuts because if there is a particular theory with overwhelming evidence in its favor, the people that don't want to believe it always point to it being a theory and not a fact as to why their counterpoint view needs to be taken serious. There are so many theories that have so much evidence in their favor that it's hard to see how a reasonable person would disagree--evolution, global warming, Barry Bonds taking steroids, this being the worst blog in history. But because they aren't technically proven, if you don't want to believe them, you don't have to...you are an idiot, but you don't have to.
And yes, we evolved from monkeys. Deal with it. There's more evidence to support the notion that humans evolved from alien life (and not like that ET dude in the movies, but rather microscopic bacteria that may have arrived via meteorites from outer space) than there is for creation.
There certainly is more evidence that humans evolved from space-borne bacteria than that an invisible hand came out from the sky and plopped every species that has ever been in existence pre-formed onto the earth. The other remarkable thing about the most recognizable of the Creationist movements is that they assume that species don't change over time, at which point I usually have to fight back chuckle-inducing visuals of a toothless inbred guy claiming that everyone in his family looks just like him, and always has.
And speaking of cancer...
Then there are the moral implications in an "intelligent design" proponent claiming that the intelligent designer purposely made DNA changes occur in a way that just happened to allow species to change and evolve in the way that we have observed, but to absolve him/her/it/them of responsibility for the same sorts of DNA changes that make cancer possible.
Fortunately for the scientists here, random or not so random cellular events are generally considered to be without much intrinsic moral implication.
Finally, in a country whose two-party system has so polarized everything political under the sun, we have become accustomed to assuming two and only two sides to every story. Theories on any given scientific topic can come in a variety of shapes, sizes and flavors. But when the powers-that-be have deemed said topic with political import, then get ready to see the public's understanding of any intelligent consensus wedged apart with the least likely (and that's being generous) explanation - by virtue of its appeal to the kind of long-standing prejudices that unfortunately tend to remain stubbornly embedded within traditional ideas.
All very good points. The politicization of science by the right is one of the most problematic facets of the current political dialogue. It's problematic when it comes from the left as well, but the right most often holds politics and thus policy hostage based on groundless intellectual chicanery.
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