More from the transcripts of day one. Kenneth R. Miller PhD describes the meaning of the concept “Theory” in science.
Evolution is just a theory, in the same way that the atomic theory of matter is just a theory, the Copernican theory of the solar system is just a theory, or the germ theory of disease is just a theory. But theories, as I emphasized earlier, are not hunches, they’re not unproven speculation.
Theories are systems of explanations which are strongly supported by factual observations and which explain whole sets of facts and experimental results.
Q. And how do you distinguish, say, a theory from a fact?
A. A fact is a repeatable, verifiable observation or a result. So, for example, in the earlier demonstratives I showed, it is a fact that there is an altered initiator sequence on thebeta-globin pseudogene. It’s also a fact that there are five working copies of this gene on Chromosome Number 11.
All of these are facts. We can test them,we can verify them, we can put them together.
But facts by themselves don’t tell us a whole lot. A very famous biologist once said that without theories to tie them together, biology is just stamp collecting. And what they meant by that was that the production of isolated individual facts is unimportant unless you can tie all those facts together in an explanatory framework, and what a theory is is just such a mechanism.
When we say “theory” in science, we mean abroad, overarching, explanatory explanation that’s very strongly supported by fact and by factual evidence and that ties all of this together in an explanatory framework that helps us make testable predictions and testable hypotheses. And if it doesn’t do that, it’s not a scientific theory.