(June 1, 2014 at 8:13 pm)Metazoa Zeke Wrote: "The Theory of Evolution is not a scientific law or a law of biology. A scientific law must be 100% correct."To be honest, if they start off like that, then I am not inclined to want to hear anything else they say. It's a non-sequitur. Evolution is a scientific theory. A scientific theory is an explanation of the facts that have been discovered in light of our current knowledge. It needs to be testable and is subject to revision or change or even complete dismissal if it happens to be completely wrong.
This habit of conflating a scientific theory with a hypothesis --which is often used as the lead-in to one or more hypotheses that are usually not remotely scientific-- gets annoying after a while because everything after "evolution is just a theory" is likely to be a product of ignorance. People who start off with that really are better off gaining an understanding of what a scientific theory really is, and what the theory of evolution actually is, first. Then maybe they'll realize that a scientific theory is not the same as their crackpot "theories" and stop wasting everyone's time.
Sorry, didn't mean to derail your topic, but we've seen a lot of this lately, it seems to me.
"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
