11/22/2023 0 Comments Statement about science phenomenaThese theories have been broadly supported by multiple lines of evidence and help frame our understanding of the world around us. Evolutionary theory, atomic theory, gravity, quantum theory, and plate tectonics are examples of this sort of over-arching theory. Some theories, which we’ll call over-arching theories, are particularly important and reflect broad understandings of a particular part of the natural world. However, context and a little background knowledge are usually sufficient to figure out which meaning is intended. Many technical fields have similar vocabulary problems - for example, both the terms work in physics and ego in psychology have specific meanings in their technical fields that differ from their common uses. Even scientists sometimes use the word theory when they really mean hypothesis or even just a hunch. Words with both technical and everyday meanings often cause confusion. So biological evolution is a theory: It is a well-supported, widely accepted, and powerful explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. To be accepted by the scientific community, a theory (in the scientific sense of the word) must be strongly supported by many different lines of evidence. Occasionally, scientific ideas (such as biological evolution) are written off with the putdown “it’s just a theory.” This slur is misleading and conflates two separate meanings of the word theory: In common usage, the word theory means just a hunch, but in science, a theory is a powerful explanation for a broad set of observations. This theory helps us understand a wide range of observations (including the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the physical match between pollinators and their preferred flowers), makes predictions in new situations (e.g., that treating AIDS patients with a cocktail of medications should slow the evolution of the virus), and has proven itself time and time again in thousands of experiments and observational studies. For example, the theory of natural selection broadly applies to all populations with some form of inheritance, variation, and differential reproductive success - whether that population is composed of alpine butterflies, fruit flies on a tropical island, a new form of life discovered on Mars, or even bits in a computer’s memory. In fact, theories often integrate and generalize many hypotheses. They are concise (i.e., generally don’t have a long list of exceptions and special rules), coherent, systematic, predictive, and broadly applicable. Theories, on the other hand, are broad explanations for a wide range of phenomena. Based on these observations and their understanding of speciation, the scientists hypothesized that this species of alpine butterfly evolved as the result of hybridization between the two other species living at lower elevations. For example, scientists observed that alpine butterflies exhibit characteristics intermediate between two species that live at lower elevations. When scientists formulate new hypotheses, they are usually based on prior experience, scientific background knowledge, preliminary observations, and logic. These reasoned explanations are not guesses - of the wild or educated variety. Hypotheses are proposed explanations for a fairly narrow set of phenomena. Similarly, scientific explanations come at different levels: Hypotheses The process of science works in much the same way whether embodied by an individual scientist tackling a specific problem, question, or hypothesis over the course of a few months or years, or by a community of scientists coming to agree on broad ideas over the course of decades and hundreds of individual experiments and studies. The process of science works at multiple levels - from the small scale (e.g., a comparison of the genes of three closely related North American butterfly species) to the large scale (e.g., a half-century-long series of investigations of the idea that geographic isolation of a population can trigger speciation).
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