You are using theory in the common context rather than scientifc context. Scientific theories are developed to explain what has been observed, and predict what might happen in a situation given various parameters. Current evidence shows progressions of changes in generations leading to development of new species, and the theory of evolution provides an explanation of why those progressions happened.

The idea that the evidence was "planted" to look that way is irrelevant. That event is not something that can be observed, and would not have any affect on future changes in species.

I think you are confusing "intelligent design" with "creationism".  They are not the same thing.

Intelligent design is generally compatible with the concept of evolution and does not assume a "young Earth" like creationism does.

I just started teaching my evolution unit today oddly enough...

Some of the biggest issues I face when teaching it are:

- a total lack of understanding what a scientific theory is and how it differs from a scientific law.
- battling years of misinformation on the mechanics of natural selection

I'm not weighing in on the thread beyond that really. I should mention that I also rock a cross everyday and that I stongly believe there is room in the world for both science and religion.

Evolution. I can't just believe that stuff just was designed by a toy maker in his shop. Like all living creatures, I believe that they all had evolved based on their living conditions. Monkeys climbed in trees to escape the water, birds beaks are determined by how they need to survive, and crocodiles... Well... They barely ever needed to change. For me, intelligence wasn't spawned, it was grown from millions of years of evolving by learning how to survive in the best and most efficient way possible no matter what animal you are, be it bear, fish, or human. Yes, I am aware everything had to have started from something, and there's no proof on what/who started anything.

I don't mind dabbling in the creation aspect of the argument, it can be fun at times, but I'm for evolution, I just prefer having bits of logical proof, plus I really dislike thinking humans are the almighty animal, above all others, never sat well with me.

This is an apples and oranges comparison: Evolution is based on science. Intelligent design is based on nonsense.

It's not really fair to compare the two. The only reason we do, I think, is because fundamentalist nutjobs try to pass off intelligent design as science in order to push their religion in schools.

Ditto, I maybe would have said it a little nicer but in all honesty I firmly ditto this. 

There is no fancy secret definition. Scientific Theories are still theories.  They are not proven.  The longer they are around without being disproven and the more evidence that supports the theory the more credibility and reliability they gather but as long as they aren't proven they are theories.

It is still possible to have multiple conflicting scientic theories that are all valid at once, simply because the evidence isn't sufficient to disprove any of them yet.

In terms of the last part, yeah, thats almost word for word what I said above.

That is why Scientology puts science in its name!  

What it means - and the brilliance of all science for that matter - is that it is fallible; no science is set in stone. This is where science and religion instinctively divide, because where religion places 4000 year old texts as infallable and perfect as they were written, science states that most things aren't 100% set in stone. That is where the term theory comes from; observations and repeated tests performed by men from all walks of life all over the world.

Technically, it is still a theory that the Earth orbits the sun for that .00001% chance that there may arise new evidence in the future. Chances are, this will never happen, but it is difficult to 100% confirm unobservable feats. This is why evolution is still a theory too. It is unobservable, but all evidence and research thus far points towards Darwin's theory. Now, that doesn't mean his original analysis was 100% infallable. Origins of Species, by today's standards, is speckled with mistakes here and there. But Darwin's foundation was sound. He was a fallible man, but his ideas were something to pay close attention to and observe. Over 150 years later, we now have DNA, fossil, geological, & astrological exidence that still point 99.999% in that direction.

And yes, you are correct, theories are improved over time. New technologies and evidence present itself each decade. Pre 2000, before the human genome project, we had no conclusive evidence to link all of life through DNA. Now we do.  In Darwin's time, all he had was what he personally observed and fossil evidence, but obviously, 150 years later, we have much more thanks to various resources and technology. So yes, theories do greatly improve over time.

Also another great example to this is the Higgs Boson particle which was discoved by scientist a few months back in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, so now the big bang theory has a much greater wealth of evidence backing it up. So all sorts of variables can be thrown into a scientific theory overtime, improving technology is just one very large and important example. Darwin never had the resources we have today.        

I think you'd have to go way back for Intelligent Design to gain any traction, back to that very first press of the button which told molecules how to behave. Everything after that point can be explained by the chemical tendency to self-assemble and having a gazillion different reactions-- complexity can arise from random chance if you that consider the entire Earth was the laboratory.

You don't really need a million monkeys on typewriters for figure out how to write a novel, all you need is one generation to figure out how to produce the word "The" and have that word preserved on all the pages the next group of monkeys start to work on.

scientific theory is a type of theory, and theories called scientific theories should meet certain criteria first like that wiki article mentions. They are still theories though.and they are still unproven by definition, and are occasionally disproven throughout history as science progresses and we find better evidence.


Edit: I dunno why I can't spell scientific without spelling it scientic lol 

What would constitute proof of evolution for you?

From the NAS site:

Fact: In science, an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as "true." Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow.

Hypothesis: A tentative statement about the natural world leading to deductions that can be tested. If the deductions are verified, it becomes more probable that the hypothesis is correct. If the deductions are incorrect, the original hypothesis can be abandoned or modified. Hypotheses can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations.

Law: A descriptive generalization about how some aspect of the natural world behaves under stated circumstances.

Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

The contention that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact" confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have.

Evolution sensu lato is actually, a fact, since we've seen populations of organisms change and diverge. We've even seen them speciate in our lifetimes. Macroevolution (the one that made the great groups arise) is just microevolution translated to very long times. We can infer it's the product of a process we can observe, and independently, we can make predictions that would only make sense with evolution as an explanation/theory.

Of course, strictly speaking, we can advocate magic and deception to explain whatever phenomena we want (maybe I didn't drink a glass of water right now, maybe a fairy provoked me a delusion). But in that case, the burden of proof rests on the proponent of fairies/Intelligent Designers. The only thing that IDers say is EVERYTHING IS VERY COMPLEX - therefore GOD/A DESIGNER EXISTS. They don't care to find plausible natural explanations.

You're right in that they're not exactly the same.

Although, the version of evolution they supposedly support is nonsense.

The layperson will often consider a theory and hypothesis one and the same, but to the scientist a theory has such an overwhelming body of evidence behind it that it is considered a fact. Evolution is a theory like the Laws of Thermodynamics are, yet no one questions the latter because electrical appliances like toasters are everywhere--and there's little political reason to debunk the population's belief in toasters.

Bingo.

This is not right.  Scientic theories are types of theories that meet certain criteria and have varing amount of reliability.  Some of them are so well established that they are considered facts, but not all.  There are also scientific theories in other areas that are much less understood like quantum theory and black hole theory.  Scientists recognize the usefulness of the theory of relativity, for instance, but they also recognize that before that theory was another, and after it will very likely be another.

I'm pretty sure intelligent design is just political propaganda, the people who fuel the effort to make it a mainstream idea probably do not themselves believe in it. You can think that god exists and still agree with evolution, that is true, but is it really possible to believe in intelligent design and still go along with evolution? I personally don't believe it is possible. Natural selection is way too *natural* to have a supernatural hand guiding it.

Also there is a lot of equating ID to a general belief in god here...not possible to continue the argument if a distinction isn't made there. It would be worth a read of the wikipedia page for intelligent design for anyone who is confused about terminology.

The thing is, that these theories are not like theories that people come up with in their everyday life. People can say they have a theory, when what they (more or less) mean is hypothesis.You said at the beginning you'd be a hard agnostic on the matter, ignoring that there is a wealth of evidence in favor of evolution, and exactly ZERO for ID. That should make reasonable people be anything but agnostic.

Would you be agnostic about the following statement? "When you turn around or close your eyes, or move far enough for any other perception to be possible, the portion of the world not at your perceptual reach dissappears. Any indirect evidence on the contrary (for example, a recording) is the work of an invisible, imperceptible magical fairy that wants to trick us". Strictly speaking, you can't prove that what I said is false, but would you give equal probability to my statement and the inverse (that the world is still there)?

It is true that theories can improve, and that's more true in the world of physics, in which we really don't know even 10% of what is out there. But it's quite remarkable that the current theory predicted, among other things, the existence of the Higgs Boson, and there you have it. The predictive accuracy of theories in physics is astounding.

ID was just a change in strategy by creationists. In fact, the term was created as a substitute to "creation" in the book Of Pandas and People, when the court said it was unconstitutional to teach creationism. From the same wikipedia article.

EDIT: every religious person that thinks humans, animals, plants, etc, are here, and are the way they are because some form or other of god wanted, is an ID proponent. I'd exclude people that thinks god made the universe, and didn't know or wanted life to arise; or people that think God wanted to make life, but largely ignored the outcome of evolution (except the very basics, like DNA, cellular composition, etc.). These last ones are light IDers.

I guess none of these groups of people are too numerous, though...

Here is some fun info about evolution, theories, facts, ect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evol...

For a scientist, whether or not you consider something a fact seems to depend on what you are doing with it. If it's reliable enough that assuming it's true won't harm your work, it's a fact

Anyway, last I knew, micro-evolution was more more well established than macro-evolution, and my understanding was that the actual important (for the purpose of these discussions) theories explaining about how humans evolved from water are still somewhat in dispute. Has macro-evolution been completely accepted since I went to school? None of the stuff I found seems to mention that being the case.

Macroevolution has been accepted since paleonthologists started studying fossils with rygor, and biologists started using this data to arrange a possible tree of life. It's been cemented through DNA evidence that confirms common ancestry of species. Again, anyone can claim that a great wizard pulled off the deception, but then, they better prove it.

It is the way it happened in some (or many) regards, that is in dispute. Microevolution is better known (but not completely), because it can be observed directly (and can be said to be a fact). Nevertheless, what happens in microevolution (including the creation of new species) is translatable to the creation of bigger groups in the distant past (macroevolution), mostly by adaptation.

When we infer that these observable processes have happened in the past, and are responsible of the creation of bigger groups, that's a theory, but it's very far from "guesswork, a simple conjecture, an opinion, or a speculation that does not have to be based on facts and need not be framed for making testable predictions.", from the wikipedia article.

Time after time, the theory has predicted many facts that we see in nature. What has changed since Darwin is our understanding of the ways evolution occurs.

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Are you familiar with experimental evolution? By forcing bacteria to adapt to aggresive environments, and because bacteria have much shorter generation times than other organisms, scientists can see completely new adaptations happen in a matter of years. They've been able to make one original pool of bacteria to diverge to different adaptations. Sometimes different samples of the same pool come up with the same adaptation, but sometimes they adapt in different ways. Now, this is an experiment with just one selective pressure. In real life, there are many selective pressures acting on the same organisms.

Here's a good video that explains ID, and it's not some religious video.

They say that the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex because if you take it apart it ceases to function as a flagellum. What they don't say (maybe because it's a relatively old video) is that the flagellum is an example of what biologists call exaptation. This means that an already existing structure that worked for something else, evolved into something with a very different function.

In the case of the flagellum, it has been proposed that protein pumps are the flagellum precursors. That is the hypothesis I'm aware of, but apparently it's not the only possible explanation: http://www.newscientist.com/artic...

And as I said, all of what they say is "complex complex, blahblah, complex, oh it's so complex that we can't care to think of a plausible explanation". That's just lazy.

Even thought I believe in ID, and not based on religion, I don't decredit anything, this threat has gotten my brain juices going and doing more research on this subject, I would also like to here the input on the people that did the poll.

My personal opinion is that it's amazing how well the human body is made it's almost like an amazing engineer created a building to make it perfect to stand the test of time and the elements, but I do believe that humans and other specias evolve to adapt to what ever environment they end up in. Like my stamet before I think somehow ID and evolution go hand in hand.