Apropos of Mike Huckabee & Ron Paul's evolution skepticism and its relevance to their political runs Andrew Sullivan has beenposting a seriesof comments from readers about whether evolution and gravity are laws or theories. I am generally somewhat averse to these semantical debates, and more interested in the fundamental question as to whether one can be rational & informed and reject evolutionary theory. But what do readers and others ScienceBloggers think? I was taught that laws are empirically validated truths and rest upon induction. Theories are basically systems of highly validated sets of interlocking hypotheses and inferences. I also think that this sort of dichotomy makes a bit more sense in physical sciences than it does to evolutionary science. Nevertheless, I do think the last comment goes a little too far here:
"Evolution" doesn't have a law because there's just not a nice mathematical expression of it to call a ...
