Evolution: A theory or Law ?!

Factual Questions
21

Talkorigins.org had a take on modern creationists that goes like this: “Sure you want to teach the controversy, so where is it?” What Talkorigins was talking about was that it has been years since people like Behe published his “definitive” book against evolution and now a look at the academic sources shows that Behe’s influence in academia is pathetic after more than 10 years.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/a-review-of-darwins-black-box-the-biochemical-challenge-to-evolution-by-michael-j-behe

But this is not an exercise on popularity, research by now would had supported many of his ideas against evolution, **but the only thing we got in recent years was even more evidence that evolution was and is real. **

22

You said, ‘A law is an fact. A theory may be a fact, and good theory probably is a fact.’ That implies that a theory might only be a ‘guess’ that may or may not be true. What I’m saying is that theories may or may not be true, but they are more than ‘guesses’ because they are supported by facts. I see a difference.

23

I thought, when it comes to Science or Mathematics. the rule becomes a Law when it is discovered the rule cannot be broken.

24

Again, this is a language issue. A capital T Theory in popular use is not the same as lowercase t theory in scientific vocabulary. Ordinary people might conflate them, and even scientists sometimes do when writing popular science, but they are two different things.

So was Murphy’s.

That’s a good indicator of the status of Law in modern speech. It is a mocking reminder that things we say always happen aren’t really always.

25

Yep. IMO ‘String Theory’ might not even ‘String Hypothesis’ because I’m not sure if it can be tested.

26

You’re missing the way “theory” is used in science. If you Google “theory of gravity” you get more than ten million links, but these are not about the question of whether gravity works or not. They’re about how it works, how to describe it, what the mechanism is.

27

Snnipe 70E writes:

> By the definitions of Theory, fact, and laws that I learned in school years ago. A
> law is an fact. A theory may be a fact, and good theory probably is a fact. A theory
> still has a question to it, it is based on assumptions.

Really? You learned this in school? What grade was this, in what school, and what teacher? Did the teacher actually write these definitions on the board? If not, how did you learn this? Did you just sort of put together these definitions from how you heard the terms sort of used? Please be more specific about where you learned these definitions.

The term “law” (even if we forget about the legal meaning of the word) is used in lots of vague ways. It includes things like Moore’s Law, which is a useful approximation to how fast computers have improved so far and how fast they may continue to improve in the future, although it’s clear that such improvement can’t continue indefinitely. It includes jokes like Murphy’s Law.

Unless you tell us precisely where you got these definitions, there’s no point in us continuing further.

28

Not true: for instance, Newton’s Laws of Motion. They express very succinctly the motion of objects and forces - and are wrong, because of relativity. Very, very slightly wrong, but wrong nonetheless. However, they’re still used as such because they’re quite useful for everyday macroscopic purposes.

As mentioned: Laws are (generally) mathematical formulas describing some sort of discrete scientific principle. They are generally more of a “what”.
Theories (generally) encompass a broader amount of knowledge and connect a number of different concepts. They are generally more of a “why”.

Both might be right or wrong.

To bring in a (not really) scientific use of the term - think of musical theory, something every aspiring classical musician has to work through - it covers the broader notion of what makes things musical and pleasant sounding, what the different keys are and different harmonies create, etc. etc. It’s not a “guess” at how music works, it’s pulling together many, many concepts learned over time into something that can’t simply be expressed in one statement. And of course there are multiple music theories and Western Music theory is different from Eastern is different from…

29

That is what I am saying, but I also realize that the known facts are sometimes interpreted wrong. And wrong theories are assumed true. The theory of a flat earth was based on good known facts that were miss read. A theory is not set in cement. A theory may be or may not be true.

30

That’s correct, but it’s a banal truth. Anything can be right or wrong. The possibility of being right or wrong is not the defining characteristc of a theory.

The defining characteristic of a theory is that it has explanatory power.

31

I learned and used these definitions in geometry, physics, and chemistry. And in these classes the definitions were stressed, and if you made a mistake on work you had to show where you had missed the definitions. When I got to college it was assumed that you understood the difference between each and we used the definitions in calculus, chemistry, physics, thermo, juice (electricity). boilers, engines, and auxillary machinery classes.

32

And that is why theories are important. They also cause the questioning mind to check things out. The fact that any theory could have an error is not the major point of the theory but should never forgotten it is part of the theory. If it is assumed blankly and solidly then learning stops.

33

If this is true, then I am very surprised you got passing grades, because what you have posted is incorrect. No scientist I know would “define” theories, facts, or laws the way you have stated them (which are not even definitions).

34

Yes, but it is also worth realizing that the evidence for some theories is so vast that they must considered as unlikely to be false as mundane facts like “the Sun rises in the East”. Though evolutionary theory is constantly being built upon and updated in the minutiae, the broad outline of evolutionary theory must be considered on of those theories, just like Newton’s laws of motion (within their regime of applicability).

35

Where did you go to school that these definitions were used?

36

To be fair to Snnipe, this tidbit has a certain “I see what you did there” quality to it. :slight_smile:

37

About that supposed South American fossil: Any given fossil might or might not be an ancestor of any given living species, and we might or might not be able to learn various details about what that organism was like when it was alive. But that’s not what our understanding of evolution is built on. The Theory of Evolution has only three main tenets, all three of which have been tested thoroughly for all of recorded history, and all three of which are near-universally accepted:

1: Organisms have offspring that are similar to their parent(s).
2: Offspring are not identical to their parent(s).
3: Some organisms have more offspring than others.

If you claim that evolution is false, then one must ask which of those three tenets you disagree with. Once you have those three, all the rest follows. And any experiment which verifies, yet again, any of those three points strengthens the support for the theory.

38

I think you’re missing an import point, though. That theory of evolution was floating around before Darwin. It was evolution through natural selection that was Darwin’s genius. Darwin “discovered” the mechanism, not the fact of evolution. And natural selection is at the heart of our understanding of evolution today.

We should add that some organism have more offspring by being better adapted to the world around them. I’m guessing that you know that, but it does’t come through in your post.

39

Scientific laws are a summary of observed behavior. They describe *what *happens.

Scientific theories are well-established explanations of observed behavior. They attempt to explain *why *something happens.

What this means is that they are two different concepts entirely. Laws are not “better” than theories, and theories do not turn into laws (or vice versa).

Neither can ever be “proven.” Contrariwise, either can always be disproven, though in practice, both theories and laws are simply modified as necessary to fit new observations.

Here is a concrete historical example from chemistry. In chemistry, students are taught about the “Law of Definite Proportions” and the “Law of Multiple Proportions.”* These two laws were always observed to be true by chemists who first noticed this in experiments in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

In 1805, John Dalton proposed an explanation for these two laws, which is termed Dalton’s Atomic Theory. It has several points, including the proposal that elements are made of extremely small particles called atoms, that atoms of different elements combine in simple whole-number ratios to form chemical compounds, and that in chemical reactions, atoms are combined, separated, or rearranged.

Note that Dalton was not the first person who ever came up with the idea that matter might be composed of discrete units. The ancient Greeks first came up with the idea thousands of years previously. The difference was that with the ancient Greeks, it was merely a philosophical idea with no scientific underpinning. Dalton’s atomic theory was different because it sought to explain actual observations of the world around us.
*The Law of Definite Proportions states that a chemical compound always contains exactly the same proportion of elements by mass. The Law of Multiple Proportions states that if two elements form more than one compound between them, then the ratios of the masses of the second element which combine with a fixed mass of the first element will be ratios of small whole numbers.

40

Worth pointing a few bits out.

In mathematics, and hence pretty much most of modern physics, theory has a couple of very specific meanings that are different to the rest of science. One “theory” is used to describe an area of study. As **Asymtotically fat **notes, there are whole areas of study like String Theory. Or in other areas of mathematics say Catastrophe Theory, Graph Theory, Number Theory. Also, some people get confused between Theory and Theorem. A Theorem is something that has been proved to be true within the scope of the axioms it is defined within. For instance, the Unique Prime Factorisation Theorem is regarded as a truth. For numbers as we defined them, no number has more than one set of prime factors. This isn’t something that is determined by experiment. Mathematicians are 100% sure that no number with more than one set of prime factors exists, and any attempt to find one experimentally will never succeed, for all values of “never”.

Mainstream science has mostly adopted Karl Popper’s view on the nature of scientific theory. A theory is a scientific theory if it can be falsified. That is, you can create the theory, and also come up with a set of discoveries or experimental results that can be actually be measured or discovered, that should they be found to be true, will invalidate the theory. A theory that you can never work out how to disprove is useless.

So, early successes of Popper’s ideas can include Einstein’s prediction of the offset of a star’s location during a solar eclipse. Relativity is falsifiable. It makes predictions, and these predictions can be tested in such a way that should they fail, the theory is accepted to have been invalidated. Counter to this is pseudo-science and non-science. Homoeopathy is pseudo-science. The tennets of homoeopathy don’t accept the idea of statistically valid double blind trials, and any scientific experiment is dismissed with various forms of special pleading. Popper was particularly scathing of Freudian psychology and Marxist theory. Both of which claimed to be scientific, but which moved the goal-posts every time an invalidating result was found.

Darwinian evolution fits as real science, as it makes specific predictions about what won’t be found in the fossil record. In particular it makes predictions that differ from things like Lamarkian evolution, or creationism. Creation Science isn’t a scientific theory, because it invokes miraculous intervention to explain away any finding that contradicts it. So it falls into the pseudo-science camp.

Thus modern scientific theories are always accepted as in some way tentative. They are cast in a form that allows for their disproval. Those theories that survive concerted attempts at disproval, and which are useful become mainstream science. The poster boy is probably general relativity - it makes some seriously counter-intuitive and strange predictions, and scientists continue to probe the bounds of these predictions, and it has survived every one of them without even the slightest hint of doubt. And yet the EPR paradox tells us that we don’t know the entire story.