(April 27, 2014 at 6:16 pm)Michael Schubert Wrote: Was I too harsh with the gentleman?I think you were. I tend to be a mixture of polite and aloof, so I would not have been harsh, though I probably would have been a bit rude by making little eye contact, offering a wan smile and a disinterested "no thank you." It probably comes off as smug and condescending, but I like to think of it as energy efficient.
"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."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
