Posted to a long thread of people talking about how they aren’t the great grandchildren of monkeys. While evolutionary theory might suggest that their great grandparents weren’t all that bright, I didn’t have the heart to go for the ad hominem attacks right out of the gate. I only cribbed the theory definition from wikipedia; it’s about the most concise definition I’ve seen.

From Etsy Forums

xinit says:
“But Evolution is NOT fact based when it comes to Origin. This is why it should not be taught in science class when it comes to our origin. Its still a theory. Im not talking about the change of things on the earth but Evolution as our origin.”

Evolution is a theory, and it would appear that you’re not up on the terminology and what it takes to become a theory in the realm of science.

A theory is not some unsubstantiated guess along the lines of “I have a theory about where I lost my car keys.” This is colloquial (wrong) usage in this regard.

A theory is a mathematical or logical explanation, or a testable model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise verified through empirical observation.

The car key example above is an example of a hypothesis – basically an educated guess. Through empirical testing, one can experiment and find data to support the hypothesis. When there’s plenty of real, empirical data to back up the hypothesis, then we can begin to discuss something as a theory.

The car key case could become a real theory if you could establish a time line of where your keys were, pictures, witnesses, testing… but until that’s done it remains an untested hypothesis.

With regard to Evolution and the origin of life on the planet Earth, I hate to tell you, but evolution is agnostic with regard to where life originated. Where life came from doesn’t matter in the slightest to the evolutionary scientist; abiogenesis is a whole other study unto itself, and it’s not necessarily biological.

Evolution is about the change, about the adaptation, and about how things have moved on from points in the past, and how they’re likely to move on in the future. It doesn’t matter if that first spark of life was the result of some bizarre accident in some alien intelligent designer’s laboratory, the willful hand of god, or a collection of random amino acids in a sludge pond. Evolution is what happened AFTER that.

Posted at 11:25 pm, April 18 2008 EST