February’s Carnival Of Evolution Is Just In Time For Darwin Day

It’s time for the Carnival of Evolution!

This month’s edition can be found at Denim and Tweed where blogger Jeremy Yoder has cleverly composed it as a letter from Charles Darwin to his friend, Joseph Hooker.

The great part of these monthly compilations is that they remind us that evolution is not just a theory…it’s a SCIENTIFIC theory.  I know I don’t have to tell any of you that this means that it’s a conceptual framework that explains and accounts for existing observations and facts that are provided by multiple sources of information.  It also makes falsifiable or testable predictions (in the case of evolution this includes predictions of what will and won’t be discovered in the fossil record).

The following is NOT a good definition of a scientific theory:

Science tries to answer the “how” question, and one of the possible theories it gives is evolution.  A theory means no one is sure; it is a good guess based on the knowledge we already have.  Lots of things we think are true are really just theories.

For political reasons, I’m not citing my source.  I’ve left clues in more than one previous blog entry.  We can make it a contest.  If you discover the source, send it to my e-mail and you’ll win a prize of some kind or another.

Enjoy the Carnival!