HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Oct. 27, 2005 How many people here get Google alerts in their email? You to go Google's web site and set up an alert and what happens is that every time there is a new entry that day for the keyword you entered they send you a link to the page in your email. Since its one of my pet peeve subjects I receive alerts for the keyword “evolution”. No this is not an ad for Google, the point is to explain that I get a lot of articles from the news and various web pages, usually three or four a day, on the subject of evolution and what people think about it. The thing I notice from an alarming number of these articles is the misuse of the word theory. I’m glad its only a word actually because if it were alive it would have been beaten and twisted to death by now. Almost as a rule the articles disparaging the theory of evolution will equate the word theory with the word hypothesis or sometimes explicitly accuse theory of being a synonym for guess. Even some of the articles in favor will distort the meaning a bit reduce thus reducing its force. Some of the other authors around here and surely some people just happening by will be thinking to themselves, “Surely he cant be preparing to write about the definition of Theory? That’s far too basic.” Well sure I am, but don’t worry I’ll complain about other stuff too. So what is it that makes an explanation for something a theory? Why even invent the word? Many detractors from the theory of evolution would have you believe that words like hypothesis, conjecture, or guess are sufficient. The truth is that these words are not sufficient. When you have an observable natural phenomenon occurring in the universe there is always an explanation. You might not know what it is at the time but it exists. After you collect data on what it is that you are observing, maybe do a few exploratory experiments to gather data, you come up with some ideas about why you are getting the observed results. Your ideas state something to the effect of “if such and such is what is really happening to cause all of this than my data would fit that scenario nicely”. This idea that you just came up with is a hypothesis. It is so far untested. Yes you did experiments to gather data but that does not mean that your ideas have been tested. To be considered a good hypothesis of course it needs to have a few prerequisite qualities met. The means to disprove it has to made clear. You have to be able to do some sort of experiment, or make some sort of observation, that if its results return in some predetermined manner than you know that your idea is wrong. Second it needs to make some sort of prediction about the observed phenomenon that you don’t already know. You need to have these things just to have a hypothesis. You still have not broken the theory barrier. I’m no scientist so there may be more requirements but these are the key requirements and at the heart of the evolution debate. Once a large number of scientists have conducted the experiments and found no conflict, and have made the observations necessary to verify the predictions made, than the scientific community begins to come to a consensus. Just in case you were wondering, the person that proposed the hypothesis is not simply trusted to know what he is talking about. Everything must be verified. After so much verification many many verifications and proofs have been done they begin to consider a hypothesis verified. It’s no longer controversial within the scientific community. This is when a hypothesis becomes a theory. After mountains of evidence and proofs have been compiled. Once all of this verification has occurred though, why would we still choose to call our explanation a theory? The answer is that scientists are a very skeptical lot. No matter how well proven a theory is they must always keep an open mind for new paradigms. Take Newton’s universal law of gravitation. For a long time this was extremely well verified. NASA still finds some of his equations acceptable to use. But we know now that the true behavior of gravity is slightly different than predicted by Newton’s theories. A difference that was predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity. The difference has since been verified many times over and now it is Einstein’s theory that is accepted as true. Theories are called that because scientists never know when a new instrument will turn up some new crucial piece of data or when some new genius will cause the next paradigm shift in thinking. I write all this because I am tired of reading so many articles, by otherwise seemingly literate individuals, that twist and distort the meaning of the word into what most dictionaries refer to as a generalization or an abuse of the true meaning. I can only hope that no one is buying this garbage meaning, and it makes me wonder something else. What ever happened to the word hypothesis anyway? Doesn’t anyone ever use it anymore? How many times have you seen a movie where the nerd character feels the light bulb click in his head and says, “Aha, I have a theory”. I feel compelled to yell at the TV screen, NO YOU DON’T! You have a guess. You have conjecture. What you have in your head can only hope to one day be a hypothesis, and falls tragically short of theory. I hope that the readership of this particular web site are intelligent enough to see the swap in meaning for the attempted trick that it is, but sometimes I read this stuff and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills or something. ------------ About the author: William A. Hurt is not a writer by any means, just an occasional participant in the debates that interest him. The author is currently serving over seas with the active duty military and is an active member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Help keep Church and State separate, www.ffrf.org Email: freethoughtadvocate@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
