In the American vernacular, “theory” often means “imperfect fact”—part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is “only” a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can’t even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): “Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science–that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was.”
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don’t go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Moreover, “fact” doesn’t mean “absolute certainty”; there ain’t no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory–natural selection–to explain the mechanism of evolution.
Stephen J. Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory”; Discover, May 1981
Just a little quibble with this quote though… In it, Gould says that Darwin proposed a theory to explain the mechanism of evolution. That’s untrue – Darwin proposed several, complementary theories to explain evolution, the most notable being Sexual Selection.



Not to mention the difficulties in learning new techniques quickly. Lately, I’ve been learning how to do RNA microinjections into 4-cell stage frog embryos. Simple, by the standards of your average embryologist, but my experience in embryology (or developmental biology, if you prefer) is limited – I was trained as a cell biologist. And learning experiences tend to involve me saying “I had better not do that again!” In other words, in the lab, I tend to learn by a winnowing process, until finally I’ve weeded out all the wrong ways to perform a technique. It’s not very efficient, but for cutting-edge protocols, one has to write the protocol themselves much of the time. The ancient Japanese proverb, “Fall down seven times, get up eight,” comes to mind.





