Fact vs. Theory

The compliation here is the use of 'theory' and 'fact' in different contexts.

In common day-to-day language we use 'theory' generally to mean a hunch - an unsupported idea, something that had yet to be tested, or one with only tenuous support "I have a theroy that if we buy player X for our team, we will be much better next season". You know the kind of thing, even scientists are happy to use the term in that sense.

However, in science, a theory is something very different. A theory is a complex set of ideas that have undergone rigorous testing, analysis, assessment, retesting, data collection etc. etc. and survived. A scientific theory can explain all the data that it is supposed to (evolution says nothing about gravity for example, a gravitational anomoly would cause problems from physicists, not biologists) and can predict future discoveries. It is not a guess, a hunch, an opinion, or even something that has been supported by a little data but not much study has been done (thius would be a hypothesis). We have the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, atomic theory etc.

Evolution is also a day-to-day fact. It happens. Just as gravity is a fact. Things falls, planets rotate, light bends etc. When someone asks you when a ball thrown up falls to Earth, you would not say it was the theory of gravity. Just gravity. You would not consider it *not* to be a fact.

In short, evolution is a scientific theory, and a fact of reality. Just as gravity is a 'theory' (how and why objects are attaracted to one another) and a fact (they *are* attracted to one another, and as predicted by the theory). Evolutionary theory is how we explain what is going on, but it *is* happening. I hope this cleans it up. Really, it is just a problem of semantics, and more importantly the misues or misunderstanding of the words by some people in different contexts.