Reading a popular LiveScience article called Global Warming: How Do Scientists Know They’re Not Wrong?, with hope filling my heart, this paragraph stopped me in my tracks.
Contrary to popular parlance, science can never truly prove a theory. Science simply arrives at the best explanation of how the world works. Global warming can no more be proven than the theory of continental drift, the theory of evolution or the concept that germs carry diseases.
Back off, man, I’m a scientist! Hate to break it to you, but continental drift was disproven; we now understand such geological activity via a snazzy new concept known as plate tectonics. Evolution is not a theory, but a fact. I’ll leave the germ statement to a microbiologist.
Sigh, with friends to science like this, who needs creationists? I need a hug. Paging highly-educated Jersey boy, txyankee. Come in, txyankee!
Hate to disagree, but theories last until the next datum arrives. If the datum supports the theory we are still where we were, If not we need a new theory.
just so we all have our ‘facts’ straight….
http://www.nap.edu/html/creationism/introduction.html
From the National Academy of Sciences:
Fact: In science, an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as “true.” Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow.
Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.
The contention that evolution should be taught as a “theory, not as a fact” confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have.
That’s nice, Blair and D. Yes, theories are the basis of science, but evolution is an observable fact, not a theory.