semantic science abuse and you
A commenter on Weird Things asks if I think that evolution should be taught as a fact or a theory and raises an interesting point. No, not that evolution is being taught as a fact is a bad thing. It shows the problem with using semantic games when it comes to scientific definitions. So should we be teaching evolution as fact? Absolutely yes. Why? Because a scientific theory is a collection of facts and I don’t know any other way to teach facts other than as facts.
Even though it’s one of the most invoked theories in the public eye, evolution is perhaps one of the most misunderstood. Creationists often ask how animals like a bipedal apes can evolve into humans. The answer is that they can’t. Nothing evolves into anything else. New species branch off from the old ones which is why reptiles and mammals exist side by side despite the reptiles predating mammals by over a hundred million years. A small population of reptiles untied by a new mutation split off and slowly became mammals while the rest of reptile kind just carried on as is and eventually branched off into dinosaurs and modern snakes, crocodilians and lizards. The idea that something can evolve into something else opens the door to present evolution in a very different light and ask how apes can evolve into humans and yet there would still be apes running around the world’s jungles.
So if a slight semantic twist which implies that evolution is a progressive force can create such a major misconception, imagine how much of a disservice the idea that a scientific theory is no more than just a random guess based on some weird rocks can do. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. It’s already being done by the Discovery Institute which misrepresents what science is all about so they can claim that their “God did it” explanations have the same plausibility as a scientific theory like gravity, evolution and planetary formation as seen by astronomers. Look at it this way. We teach gravity as a fact in science class and yet gravity is “just a theory…”
