“It’s Just a Theory”

Hello science dudes and dudettes!

That’s Right! If you’ve read the previous two posts and have had the “If I use the scientific method, I am doing science” epiphany, then you’re in the club! We’ve successfully established some key concepts that are important to remember moving forward. As a reminder, we make observations, formulate hypotheses, test our hypotheses with an experiment, reject or fail to reject our hypotheses, and talk about our results.

Hypothesis hypothesis hypothesis! Rember, a scientific hypothesis is testable idea.

Some hypotheses are rigorously tested over and over again. Even after countless experiments by scientists all over the world yeilding the same or similar results, they are still tested to this day. Because of the insane number of times these hypotheses have been tested and not rejected, they are now widely accepted as truth.  

Remember folks, in science, we are skeptical. We never PROVE anything. We only reject or fail to reject a hypothesis. We can, however, narrow down the possible explanations for an observed phenominon until there are no other viable explanations and accept the last man standing as truth. These are called Scientific theories.

“But wait! I thought that a theory is some sort of vague idea in which people are only slightly confident.”

Wrong friendo.

Scientific theories are the explanations or ideas in which we are the MOST sure because they’ve been tested over and over and over again with the same results. Here are some notable ones.

1. The Germ Theory of Disease
   1. the theory that certain diseases are caused by the invasion of the body by microorganisms, organisms too small to be seen except through a microscope. We accept the Germ Theory of Disease as truth because of direct observation. We know which microbes cause which diseases, and we can PREVENT diseases thanks to that knowledge. It’s why we dont drink raw milk or water contaminated with animal waste. Also, for the love of God vaccinate your children. 
2. Gravity Theory
   1. (physics) the law that states any two bodies attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Thats a lot of fancy talk for the reason we dont all float into space. We know that gravity is why things fall when you drop them and that the sun’s gravity keeps the earth in orbit. 
3. The Theory of Evolution
   1. Here we go. The Theory of Evolution is on this list because it has been tested with just as much, if not more, rigor as the other two. The Theory of Evolution states that there are changes in the heritable traits of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules. I won’t go into too much detail here, because I plan to make an entire post dedicated to this topic to clear up some misconceptions. “Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” – Theodosius Dobzhansky

That’s all for today! Next post will be completely dedicated to some essential concepts to understanding the fundamentals of evolutionary theory.

Peace!