Staying skeptical of evolution

[dougo]

One more post for today. The Boston Globe has an article about the fight against teaching evolution in public schools (link from gibsonfeed). One thing mentioned is a label placed on the title page of a biology textbook: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." I happen to agree strongly with these statements, but the point is that everything should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered. It's sort of redundant to put it on a textbook when this implicitly applies to all textbooks. Somehow I don't think putting the same label on bibles would be accepted by anyone, though.

Really, I'd be happy if human evolution were taken out of schools, as long as it's replaced by a greater emphasis on critical thinking, logic, and the scientific method. Teach a man to fish, etc. Of course schools should also continue to teach genetic reproduction and natural selection, since those theories are straightforward to test with experiments. Actually, natural selection isn't even a theory, it logically follows from genetic reproduction.

The article also quotes the 100-year-old Ernest Mayr: "What it really amounts to is a break with our Constitution, which tells you that you should keep religion out of public life." If only the Constitution actually said that!

Comments

[wrog]

I want children to be taught the difference between facts and theories

and you need to be taught the difference between a theory and a hypothesis. A theory is a model, a mechanism for explaining an existing body of experimental results; the really good ones can make predictions but that's not actually necessary. Theories are not right or wrong; they just have domains in which it's appropriate or inappropriate to apply them, and degrees of how close they match the said experimental data. Newtonian gravity is a perfectly good theory for calculating the period of the moon's orbit, and a completely sucky theory for calculating stuff about black holes or the structure of the universe. General Relativity is fine for the latter, but doesn't tell you shit about the structure of the atom. And so it goes....

I mean, yes, the dictionary will tell you that one of the meanings of "theory" is as a synonym for "hypothesis", but that's explicitly not the sense being used in "Theory of Evolution".

[dougo.livejournal.com]

(Well, in my semantics class we learned the difference between a theory and a model, but that's another set of definitions altogether...)

I would say Newtonian theory is wrong, because experimental data repeatably contradicts it. You're right, wrong theories can still be useful as approximations, but that doesn't mean they're not still wrong. As far as I know, Darwinian evolution hasn't yet been contradicted, unlike (say) Lamarckian adaptation. That doesn't make it right, it's just not known to be wrong. My point (well, one of my points) is that we should be teaching that "not known to be wrong" is the strongest thing we can say, and that it's not the same as "in doubt".

[wrog]

by this yardstick all theories are wrong, since

1. experimental evidence never exactly correlates with what the theory predicts, we simply don't have explanations for every deviance and never will, and
2. unless one is arrogant enough to believe a particular theory is the last word on a given subject (an attitude which is generally considered not very scientific), it's pretty much inevitable that we'll eventually encounter a domain (and a corresponding body of experimental evidence) where it doesn't apply. (GR is almost certainly in trouble the first chance we get to study black holes up close and personal.)

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Well, the theory "the Red Sox won the World Series" is probably not wrong. (To use an example from another thread in this discussion.) If that doesn't count as a theory by your definition, then I'd like to see a statement of the definition.