Could we just agree to tell the truth about this from now on? The New York Times has an interesting story by Cornelia Dean on the training that museums have started to give their docents and employees on how to deal with creationists. A sad commentary on our current state of affairs that such training is becoming necessary, but probably nobody reading this blog is surprised.
But as a supplement to the article, the Times reprints a FAQ from a pamphlet handed out by the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, N.Y. It includes the following question:
Is evolution ‘just a theory’? A “theory” in science is a structure of related ideas that explains one or more natural phenomena and is supported by observations from the natural world; it is not something less than a “fact.” Theories actually occupy the highest, not the lowest, rank among scientific ideas. … Evolution is a “theory” in the same way that the idea that matter is made of atoms is a theory.
This is right in spirit, but the truth is not so very scary or technical that we can’t just fess up to it. The truth is that the hierarchy of “hypotheses” and “theories” and “laws” and “facts” that many people are taught in elementary school (or wherever) has absolutely no relationship to how real scientists use those words. Which is, that they are completely inconsistent and sloppy with their use. There is no procedure by which an ambitious young Hypothesis accumulates some promising support, and is brought up before the Most Supreme Council of Learned Scientists to be promoted to a Theory.
The reality of the situation is that it’s a mess. I can invent a half-baked idea tonight and call it a “model” or a “theory” and nobody cares, or would even notice. The Standard Model of Particle Physics is much closer to objective truth than Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, and the General Theory of Relativity is somewhere in between.
And “facts”? Eavesdrop on some scientists at work. You will go years without hearing any of them talk about “facts.” They’ll talk about data, and measurements, and observations, and experiments — those are things with identifiable meanings that we can work with. But call something a “fact” and you’re making some absolute metaphysical claim that isn’t the kind of thing scientists like to do. Likewise “proof.” Mathematicians and logicians, who deal with abstract symbols independent of any connection to nature, prove things. Scientists don’t. They figure out that certain beliefs should be held with greater and greater confidence, but proving something is simply outside the domain of science.
Which does bring us to the one almost-subtle point in this generally easy-to-understand business. Science never gets anything 100% right; it is always working on a better understanding, improving on the best current theory (or model, or whatever). But it does get some things right enough. The Big Bang, the round earth, Newton’s Laws, the Standard Model, natural selection — none of these is “proven” correct, but they are all correct, within certain domains of validity. There comes a point when, even though you can never (even in principle) prove an idea to be a fact, it becomes well-enough established that maintaining a skeptical attitude is a sign of crackpottery, not wisdom.
So let’s just quit the charade and let the unwashed masses in on the truth as far as “theory” is concerned. It’s a shorthand term for a model of some part of nature — but the label implies absolutely nothing about how true that model is. (The phlogiston theory didn’t stop being a theory once we knew it wasn’t true.) What matters isn’t whether we label something a “theory” or a “law” or a “fact,” it’s whether we label it “right” or “wrong.” As in, Darwin was “right,” the creationists are “wrong.”
> The nature of the risk of them being incorrect is different
I would not use the word “incorrect”. Memories and documents are what they are.
It is our task (as scientists and in every-day life) to sort them into a consistent world view. Evolution is as important to this consistent world view as are
Newton’s laws.
Creationists on the other hand assign a high value to one document only and
ignore all other evidence.
Arun:
Maybe I’m not a million miles away from your position, perhaps, although I would say ‘fact’ to describe something that we can get from scientific theory (so in that sense, I wouldn’t describe either as fact, not unless I was using it as shorthand, in the sense I spoke of earlier, for ‘something we’re assuming is true for lack of persuasive reason not to’). My statement was about which was ‘more scientific’, rather than which one was ‘factual’, in any case. My personal belief is that momentum is conserved and that evolution happened (and, like you, I’d paint ‘evolution’ in broad strokes), but I’m happy (eager!) to admit that I could be wrong.
The point about scientificness (from my position as a falsificationist), though, wasn’t that evolution would be hard to disprove (because, let’s face it, ID is impossible to disprove if it is accompanied by omnipotent intelligent gawdlike force) but as to whether it is easy to make and test falsifiable statements from evolutionary theory to answer questions like “did ‘evolution’ cause the range of species, etc, that we see today”, where I’ve put ‘evolution’ in inverted commas to indicate the fuzzy vagueness of the term as we are using it, as you and I both mentioned. ID clearly fails this test woefully, but I don’t think that the lot of the evolutionist is a particularly easy one, either, in this regard, for all that they certainly can do some pretty impressive stuff with regards to falsification. The difficulty is not a flaw in evolutionary theory, nor the result of a deficiency of talent, but rather, it is inherent in the subject matter.
As I say, the idea that one theory might be ‘less scientific’ than another theory in a different (and more testable) area doesn’t bother me a jot. The key fact, when deciding what theories to explain species diversity belong in the scientific curriculum, is how scientific they are compared to each other. Consequently, one can’t make the case for including ID in a biology lesson as a competing theory to evolution.
Finally, and at the risk of being momentarily right on topic, I support the Museum of the Earth/Ithaca solution, because the silly ‘it’s only a theory’ attack on evolution is best rebutted first by an explanation of what ‘a theory’ really is, in science.
Well, I said ‘finally’, but I clearly didn’t mean it. Finally (really), non-falsificationists won’t, in all probability, be persuaded by anything I say at all; falsificationists who do believe that evolutionary theory is as scientific as anything else in science will agree with me that falsificationism is important but disagree with me (perhaps from a position of more knowledge!) on the respective levels of falsifiability. In any case, we’d both agree that ID doesn’t belong in a science classroom.
iso42:
Rather than ‘incorrect’ we could say ‘unreflective of what actually happened’ or question the correlation of what is written with what occurred? Clearly we can systematically doubt ourselves into the ground.
I don’t care about ‘world view’, though, so I wouldn’t care to assess relative importance. I just work in, and study, science because it interests me, because I like a puzzle.
In reply number 27, the first line should read “Maybe I’m not a million miles away from your position, perhaps, although I wouldn’t say ‘fact’…”, ie, ‘wouldn’t’, not ‘would’.
The discussion of evolution here and in the post on Lisa Randalls NYT piece seems a little unclear to me.
If I paraphrase PZ Myers in http://pharyngula.org correctly, we should distinguish between the observation(s) of evolution (antibiotics resistance, fossil record, observed speciation) and the theory (theories) of evolution based on random variation (sex, mutation) and nonrandom selection (culling).
We should regard the numerous observations as well established facts and the later theories like neodarwinism as well established theories. The origin of life is irrelevant to the theorys validity (but would be nice to know some day). Randalls discussion on chromosome number or Adams on ‘exhaustive falsifiable investigation’ he would likely call old ‘god of the gaps’ arguments.
I wish he would have walked us through his reasoning again. Instead he seems to be rather upset (http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/danged_physicists/) by Randalls piece and this thread.
A propos Myers, it is perhaps also appropriate to mention that he takes Adams term ‘Darwinism’ as a sure creationist sign, if I remember correctly. (The theory has long since evolved from Darwins views.)
It is also a common creationist fallability to state that evolution theory can not be falsified. It can, and it has been modified several times, see above. See
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211.html for a simple correction and
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/falsify.html for a full discussion.
Oh, and ‘evolutionist’ is another of Myers telltale signs of creationists. Assuming I still remember correctly.
A great piece by John Allen Paulos appeared in the Guardian on September 8 (and more recently on Edge.org). An excerpt:
I’m afraid the significance of this point will go largely unappreciated.
Tobjorn Larsson said:
‘Oh, and ‘evolutionist’ is another of Myers telltale signs of creationists. Assuming I still remember correctly.’
I’ll defer to your superior knowledge. To me it was meant to take the same role as ‘physicist’ or ‘biologist’, ‘thermodynamicist’, etc. For myself, I haven’t claimed that evolution isn’t falsifiable, I just ventured my personal opinion that it is less prone to a falsificationist investigation program than some other theories in science. But then, as I say, that doesn’t bother me much; I’m a scientist, but I don’t worship at the Temple of Science.
To Chris W:
“So far, so good. What is more than a bit odd, however, is that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution – for example, many fundamentalist Christians – are among the most ardent supporters of the free market. They accept the market’s complexity without qualm, yet insist the complexity of biological phenomena requires a designer”
Right, that is an interesting point. Of course, one cannot resist the mental image of the canonical Guardian reader reading this and reflecting uncomfortably that this line of reasoning, in reverse, turns him into the economic equivalent of a creationist. But no, of course, the canonical Guardian reader is constitutionally incapable of doubting that The Market is Always Evil.
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The free market has a considerable amount of design in it.
What’s called the ‘free market’ does, at least. But it’s not particularly free (it’s just freer than some people would like).
“I’ll defer to your superior knowledge.”
My knowledge on this, as on many things, is severely limited. Here I am mainly regurgitating my impression of Myers knowledge on http://pharyngula.org/ . He is a biologist and an energetic evolution proponent. Read him directly for superior knowledge in this.
On the specific term ‘evolutionist’ my impression is that Myers thinks:
-creationists reads the same evangelical texts were terms like ‘Darwinist’ and ‘evolutionist’ is misused.
– he is a biologist and evolution is just one well established theory in this area that every biologist use. The specialist on evolution are probably called just that.
However, regarding falsification I heartily sympatice with your intentions. Falsificability gives trust to theories and efficiently kills faithbased reasoning; I know hands on of examples. But I don’t think that it is realistic to think that every statement of a theory must be falsificable. I don’t see why at least a single central falsifiable statement is not enough to lend trust.
I also think the ‘god of the gaps’ argument shows that one must acknowledge missing knowledge and less trustful ad hocs, else one open up a backdoor for faithbased reasoning anyway.
I think that if the faithbased reasoners were able to ask decent questions to attack the gaps, they’d be doing it by demonstrating erroneous predictions from evolutionary theory and they’d actually be doing science and, therefore, doing us a favour. As it is, they’re just pointing out deficiencies (or what they believe are deficiencies) in the theory but their Big New Idea, ID, is a busted flush, scientifically. In essence, they’re saying ‘theory A has some areas that aren’t pinned down yet, let’s replace it with theory B, to which I am emotionally attached, that makes no falsifiable predictions at all‘.
I don’t have a problem with areas of a scientific endeavour being ‘unscientific’, as I see the description as being representative of the overall whole. ID, though, just isn’t scientific in nearly any degree. The more different falsifiable statements we can make from our theory, the better, I say. I think that some areas of investigation will lend themselves better to this than others, but the damning thing about ID is that it effectively represents an attempt to try and avoid asking falsifiable statements but the IDers still put it forward as a ‘scientific alternative’.
Sean has a good point in asserting that the definition of “theory” is all too fuzzy, and the ensuing discussion “proves” by any practical measure that attempts to clarify it will go over the heads of at least 99% of the literate population.
How ’bout we take a step backward and try to establish a comprehensible definition of “science”? So far I haven’t found anyone literate (which I use as a baseline of age & education below which such discussions are useless) who doesn’t seem to get it when I say science deals only with what can be measured and tested.
This has several advantages, including that it concedes there is much of reality (religious devotion & other emotions, concepts like “America”, etc) that exists but is not in the realm of science. The “measurement” part also points to the actual daily work of science (as opposed to the Hollywood version), and the “testing” part implies the process of building & checking hypotheses, if the conversation continues in that direction.
Best of all, in present context, the question, “What in (whichever variant of) the idea of creationism can be measured or tested?” – whether in a friendly chat or a heated debate – leads one’s audience to a much better understanding of why science advocates draw the lines the way we do.
The Onion weighs in w/ its usual satirical stylings on this topic:
EVANGELICAL SCIENTISTS REFUTE GRAVITY WITH NEW “INTELLIGENT FALLING” THEORY
KANSAS CITY, KS-As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Burdett added: “Gravity-which is taught to our children as a law-is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, ‘I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.’ Of course, he is alluding to a higher power.”
Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world’s leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.
According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God’s Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.
The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue “so they can make an informed decision.”
“We just want the best possible education for Kansas’ kids,” Burdett said.
Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein’s ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.
“Let’s take a look at the evidence,” said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden.”In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, ‘And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.’ He says nothing about some gravity making them fall-just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, ‘But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.’ If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling.”
Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton’s mathematics and Holy Scripture.
“Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein’s general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world,” said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. “They’ve been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don’t know how.”
“Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work,” Carson said. “What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that ‘gravity waves’ and ‘gravitons’ are just secular words for ‘God can do whatever He wants.'”
Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.
“Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the ‘electromagnetic force,’ the ‘weak nuclear force,’ the ‘strong nuclear force,’ and so-called ‘force of gravity,'” Burdett said. “And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus.”
Source: http://theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4133&n=2
In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion. – Carl Sagan
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It seems to me that you fail to distinguish hypothesis from theory. The former is a speculative idea and the later is an hypothesis that has been proven to your peers. You are grammatically (and logically) incorrect if you state “my theory is…” unless you have proven it. You should say “my hypothesis is…”.
Yes, I know, nobody does this kind of distinctions, but I suggest you do.
And I would like to point to the funny spyder that his “gravity as intelligent design” was actually a theory many years ago: planets and stars were supposedly made of a substance different from earth, wind, fire and water, the four “materials” in vogue, called the “quintessence” or fifth essence. Its properties? Well, the main one was that it did not fall, like the other four substances. That is why Newton’s ideas were so startling: the heavens and earth were united, because they were made of the same stuff.
Finally, ID does make some falsifiable predictions: mainly that I am intelligently designed. ID can not explain the human embrionic evolution with gills and tail, the appendix, the senility, and all the inherited defective traits that an intelligent designer should eliminate from my body. And I am not fat nor ugly, or my complains would be louder, because the guy has had 15 billion years to get rid of those things… For an almighty being this seems to be a quite lazy design 🙂 ID advocates predict I should be perfect, or they have no intelligent designer behind life. And I am not even talking of diseases, death and the Superbowl TV ordeal… 🙂
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