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njlauren -> RE: End ABSTINANCE "education"! ( Since it's not science and all... ) (12/30/2013 8:07:46 PM)
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ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri
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ORIGINAL: graceadieu
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ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri
And, here, you are wrong. I didn't say the Theory of Evolution was wrong, just that it hasn't been proven completely. There is evidence, but there are holes and gaps.
Teaching Evolution as "this is what science thinks happened" and Creation/ID as "here is another theory that others think explains it," doesn't demean either, but it also doesn't teach something as settled science when it isn't settled science.
What is really interesting, is that there are people who cling to Evolution as tightly as some cling to the Bible; it's almost like it's their religion. There are gaps in our understanding, but people accept it as Gospel, applying faith where science hasn't shown the proof.
There's nothing in science that's "proven completely", and we're never going to know everything about anything. That's not how it works. That you said this makes it clear that you don't have a solid understanding of what science is and how it works.
The scientific method works like this: You have a hypothesis (a guess or idea), and you design an experiment to try and disprove it. You test and test to see if you can disprove your idea. If you can't, then that's basically what you might call a fact or datum, but it's still always open to someone coming along and doing another test and overturning it. Then, if you get a whole bunch of "facts", you can try to find a model that best fits them. You test that model over and over again, using it to make predictions and seeing if it fits future data that is discovered. If the model is the one that fits the data best, and is supported over and over again by the tests and can't be disproven, then it becomes accepted - "proven" - science and is called a theory.
Even this, like everything else in science, is open to being modified somewhat when someone has new data and a better fit model. But that's really hard to do, especially when there's such a massive amount of data supporting one conclusion like with evolution.
You have no idea what I know or what I don't know. Now, just to play along, understand that my comment was towards a poster that said that evolution is settled science. If there are gaps and unknowns, it's not settled, is it?
The problem with that statement is it is deliberately misleading, which is what the fundies prey upon, they confuse the overarching theory with the specific details. The overarching theory of gravity is settled science, gravity exists as a field, it behaves in certain ways that have been proven out time and again, even though no one has really worked out the internal mechanics of gravity, if it is a partcle or a string, you name it...but it is settled.
Science is settled that organisms evolve, that life evolved from simple to complex organisms, that humans evolved from a common ancestor with the other primates, what they don't know are all the steps, but the fact of evolution, like gravity, settled. The broad consensus of science is that natural selection guides development of species through mutation, it is accepted science, what isn't know are all the details.
Put it this way, you see a car going by on the street, you know roughly how it works, but you also don't know all the details of the firing order, how it is programmed to handle load and/or adjust valve timing, but you know it is a car. With evolution, the mechanisms on a broad scale are known and settled, the details are not. Settled science doesn't require all the details be accepted, for example, well over 90% of scientists working in climate accept that climate change is happening, where they differ is how fast it is happening, what can be done about it, and how much of it is man made and how much is natural.....
It is funny to me that the religious, with their need to have a creator who operates like a kid with an erector set, cast aspersions on Evolution for the holes scientists themselves note and work towards closing, when religious theory and dogma has more holes then a piece of swiss cheese and in explaining things, is as weak as one, too......
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