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Texas School Board Searching For Alternatives To Evolutionary Theory
An anonymous reader writes "[Ars Technica] recently reviewed the documentary The Revisionaries, which chronicles the actions of the Texas state school board as it attempted to rewrite the science and history standards that had been prepared by experts in education and the relevant subjects. For biology, the board's revisions meant that textbook publishers were instructed to help teachers and students 'analyze all sides of scientific information' about evolution. Given that ideas only reach the status of theory if they have overwhelming evidence supporting them, it isn't at all clear what 'all sides' would involve."
Gravity is a very active area of theoretical study. We don't understand what it is very well, and there are strong indications that General Relativity is not complete, that we need a better theory to fully explain interactions, particularly on the quantum level.
You may be confusing the theory with the fact. The fact of gravity is that objects attract, or on a more human scale, that things fall down. That is something you can just observe, sometimes without meaning to. The theory of gravity is to explain how and why the interaction works. That one we don't have nailed.
Not trying to support Texas here in their unscientific bullshit, but gravity is not an open and shut case. What its method of action is, how it works on very small and large levels, and how it unifies with the other forces are still not well understood.
Bullshit. You're equivocating for the same nonsense of the creationists.
This isn't true at all. You're redefining theory as the sole progenitor of hypothesis. You've got it backwards, there, chief.
The National Academy of Sciences lays it out for you:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6024&page=2
It is incorrect that ideas only reach the status of "theory" when there's overwhelming evidence. A theory is a theory because it makes a testable, falsifiable, hypothesis. We have theories that aren't well tested. We don't go teaching them in science class, but that doesn't mean they aren't theories. This idea that "theory" means "proven beyond any reasonable doubt" is silly. It doesn't.
A hypothesis is a testable, falsifiable conjecture. A theory is arrived at by testing one or more hypotheses in a model and finding them not to be untrue. You are correct that there are theories which have not been exhaustively tested. The TOE is not one of those. A shitload of observations in many fields support it - or rather, do not support an alternative to it.
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