Psyberspace

And Stephen J Gould says the same thing.  Why is this on my mind?  Thinking about “Listening to the Spirit of the Times”.  A sociodrama workshop I’ll be conducting at the ANZPA conference in  Sydney. Evolution comes into it, so does the technium (see Kevin Kelly), so does Moreno and his perspectives on creativity, and Marx on class… and lots more.  If we integrated all this theory would it be a theory?   How do we make sense of the times we are in?

Evolution is a Fact and a Theory:

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don’t go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

This is a useful little notion.

Evolution is Not Just a Theory: home:

Some people think that in science, you have a theory, and once it’s proven, it becomes a law. That’s not how it works. In science, we collect facts, or observations, we use laws to describe them, and a theory to explain them. You don’t promote a theory to a law by proving it. A theory never becomes a law. This bears repeating. A theory never becomes a law.

In fact, if there was a hierarchy of science, theories would be higher than laws. There is nothing higher, or better, than a theory. Laws describe things, theories explain them.