Here's the best one I have found by Stephen J. Gould. He has put this
as well as anyone else:
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect
fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to
theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist
argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages
about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact,
and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then
what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed
this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in
what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It
is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been
challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the
scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and
theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing
certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of
ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when
scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of
gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't
suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved
from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed
mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no
such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of
logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and
achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world.
Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists
often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they
themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such
a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I
suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility
does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact
and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always
acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the
mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin
continually emphasized the difference between his two great and
separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and
proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of
evolution.
- Stephen J. Gould, " Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981
Here's a similar definition by Douglas J. Futuyma. He makes the
following comment:
A few words need to be said about the "theory of evolution," which
most people take to mean the proposition that organisms have evolved
from common ancestors. In everyday speech, "theory" often means a
hypothesis or even a mere speculation. But in science, "theory" means
"a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or
causes of something known or observed." as the Oxford English
Dictionary defines it. The theory of evolution is a body of
interconnected statements about natural selection and the other
processes that are thought to cause evolution, just as the atomic
theory of chemistry and the Newtonian theory of mechanics are bodies
of statements that describe causes of chemical and physical phenomena.
In contrast, the statement that organisms have descended with
modifications from common ancestors--the historical reality of
evolution--is not a theory. It is a fact, as fully as the fact of the
earth's revolution about the sun. Like the heliocentric solar system,
evolution began as a hypothesis, and achieved "facthood" as the
evidence in its favor became so strong that no knowledgeable and
unbiased person could deny its reality. No biologist today would think
of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for evolution;" it simply
has not been an issue for a century.
- Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed., 1986, Sinauer
Associates, p. 15
On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:37:15 -0600, Dana <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> You got me, Larry, what's the defeinition of a scientific? I'm
> starting to understand the complaints about liberals thinking everyone
> is stupid.
>
> Dana
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