(May 24, 2015 at 7:28 am)robvalue Wrote: I wonder what exactly people think "science" gets out of proposing evolution if it was false? It's not like we all pay a Darwin tax. Is it really just the thought that science wants to piss off religion? What a dim, childish science that would be.
It seems as if most scientists of centuries past were not looking to overthrow established beliefs, either. Considering the grief that some of them got for challenging 'known truths' you have to wonder how much scientific progress was held back because of the pressure to conform. We hear of the few who held to their claims in the face of persecution, but we cannot know how many buried important finds or research in order to avoid a backlash. So instead of paying a Darwin tax, we may be paying a not-insignificant religious tax in the form of lost progress.
"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
