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February 12, 2005
terministic discrimination [years]
(my [years] friends are all geniuses, in far-flung fields. i'll pontificate at a later date about their greatness. argus in the sidebar is one; i think i'm the only other of us currently actively blogging.)
friend becky (b2) wrote:
...and honestly, I don't see why we can't throw the religious view in with the other evolutionary theories as long as it is presented as a theory...
friend jim(iny) answered:
really? on the surface, i can give you a couple reasons we shouldn't. but i don't think that's really what you mean...read an interesting article in national geographic a couple months ago on darwin and evolution. the teaser on the cover said "was darwin wrong?", the article started off with the word "NO" in two inch letters... one of the points in the article was that we refer to evolution as a "theory", when really it's only a theory in same way gravity is a theory. we didn't write the rules, so we can't really call it a "law"(although we often do with gravity), but our math and science explains the "theory" pretty well, our experiments support the "theory" without fail, and no evidence has been brought forward to show the "theory" to be wrong.
i read the same article jim did, although i read it a little differently. here's what i see as the fundamentally problematic rhetoric beneath/between these lines: we're working w/two different definitions of "theory," & we don't differentiate between the two. when used interchangeably, they cause an awful lot of confusion & resentment.
def #1: (probably the more common, "layman's" hallway/watercooler term) a theory is a guess, hunch, or idea that, if true, would explain something in a way that would make it easier to understand. my comp. teacher, in one of her early books, defines it as an "enabling fiction." it's something we use as a frame to understand something else. we have "theories" about who took the lunch money, why stacey acts like an idiot whenever billy is around, & how to put literal readings of the bible into informative & productive conversation w/other ways of talking about the origins of our speices.
def #2: (what i think of as "scientific theory") a theory is a set of "facts" based on observed or observable characteristics that explains something complex as well as it can be explained until more data is gathered. this type of theory doesn't pretend it can answer everything; when it says "this is what happened," it always means "as best we can figure currently; we have a few outliers, but they aren't really patterned yet; when we know more, we'll change the theory & explain it differently."
the problem, in usage, happens when we treat scientific theory as always-true fact, instead of best-explanation-so-far fact (because we were taught to, because we have this enlightenment preoccupation w/pretending we can know everything & that there's any such thing as objective knowledge, & we have lots of objective language that makes it hard for us to talk about the world in any other way), and when we say of anything that it's "just" a theory, as if "theory" were a pre-step toward an idea's becoming a totally-knowable Truth (capital platonic t included).
gravity IS a theory. it works predictably most of the time. there are still outliers that physicists can't yet explain. there are still patterns being sought after. we don't call gravity "just" a theory b/c we're used to assuming that b/c the parts we see are reliable, the whole thing is proven & seamless, but it isn't any more seamless than evolution, than translating creation-stories out of mismatched treatises in dead languages. if we're going to teach our children that anything is a theory, let's teach them first what "theory" means to science--to use the word properly in the first place--and let's drop the "just." all it does is obfuscate an issue that's complex enough--and fascinatingly--already.
Posted by ttobryan at February 12, 2005 06:42 PM