Boru: my mother has a similar problem, and I think that she has some latent fear that she'll be blamed if she makes a decision and things don't go well. She prefers the opposite-- let someone else make the decisions so that she can complain if things don't go as hoped. The worst was when she needed help and would not make decisions because she was almost paralyzed by that fear. And by "needed help" I'm referring to the time when she suffered a bad contusion from a fall and waved off offers of help until I got home and she was nearly delirious from the pain. Also by "needed help" was the time she was having a FUCKING HEART ATTACK and thought that dropping hints and then waving off my concern was the proper course of action.
"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