(January 11, 2015 at 8:12 pm)Hammod1612 Wrote: Now i know for a fact that it's because science constantly discovers new things to replace the old theories, which i told her, but is this actually a fact, that theories have an average lifespan of 30 years?I have no idea. Scientific theories are simply an attempt to explain how things work, given the facts we have. As we learn more, those theories will change to reflect that greater knowledge. So it's possible that the "average lifespan" of a theory is 30 years. Over the past 300 years we've advanced so quickly in most scientific fields that the 30-year figure might be too long!
"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
