(November 26, 2014 at 4:29 pm)Beccs Wrote: Even as a kid I knew these things!It's not that people don't know, it's that they're willing to pretend to be outrageously stupid if it means a shot at winning a lawsuit. On the other hand, the law now requires drug manufacturers to list possible side effects of their medications on advertisements, which leads to the unintentionally humorous TV commercials where a fast-talking announcer tries to fit the frightening list of possible consequences into the last 10-15 seconds of air time. It's weird to see 20 seconds of "why this drug will make your life sooo much better" followed by 15 seconds of rapid-fire "may cause heart attack, stroke, cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, and death."
"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
