scientific theories taught as factual

The fact is that two bodies with mass will attract each other. This is the fact of gravity. It is true beyond any reasonable doubt. It would be perverse to deny it.The law of gravity states that the strength of the attraction is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them.The theory of gravity hypothesises that gravity is caused by the curvature of spacetime that occurs as a result of mass/energy.I'm sure that we can basically agree on this. So:A fact is information about the universe which is true beyond reasonable doubt.A law can describes a fact, often in mathematical terms.A theory explains a fact.As wiki describes it: "A scientific law attempts to describe an observation in nature while a scientific theory attempts to explain it."Evolution is a fact. That evolution has been occurring for billions of years and has resulted in the natural history we see in the museums and described in scientific papers is a fact. There is a theory that explains this fact, which is often called 'The theory of evolution'.The education system is unfortunately imperfect. There is limited time and often a set curriculum of concepts that need to be learned. That means that subsidiary ideas are left to one side. One such subsidiary idea is the philosophy of science and the descriptions of what 'fact', 'theory' and 'law' means. As such, the consensus theories are simply taught, quickly and incompletely. Students learn about the more complex concepts at higher education (usually at university level, but it probably depends on the country and its education policies).

Evolution is just variation within a family. It's just as the tree grows we start to create new family names for ease of reference. We are all part of the human family, but we are also part of the primate family and all primates are part of the mammal family etc etc.Thus, evolution of primates is just variation within the primate family.Anybody who has offspring is a transitional between their parents and their offspring.

And this goes to show that guarded scepticism is always the best way to think. You wouldn't have looked so, 'stupid', had you gone with 'You've seen the real Lucy? I thought she was kept in a locked vault?' but you went with the all caps "YOU WERE LIED TOO." It makes it sounds like an authoritative fact, which is something I'm sure you'd rather science shied away from. Anyway, for your information:

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Oct. 24, 2006. ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - One of the world’s most famous fossils ” the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974 ” will go on display abroad for the first time in the United States, officials said Tuesday.

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Even the Ethiopian public has only seen Lucy twice. The Lucy exhibition at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum in the capital, Addis Ababa, is a replica while the real remains are usually locked in a vault. A team from the Houston Museum of Natural Science spent four years negotiating the U.S. tour, which will start in Houston next September.

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So yes, it is entirely feasable that Coragyps has seen the real deal. I'm sure Coragyps can fill you in on the details - but I hoped I could provide a little friendly pointer: something you think is true, might be wrong. If someone tells you something that conflicts with something you thought was true - the better stance is not to assume that the person was lied to (though some thought might lead you to conclude this is the most probable outcome), but to assume that either they are not right (they were mislead, misunderstood what they were looking at) or that what you had previosly thought as true is in fact only partly true or was once thought to be true but now isn't.With scepticism of others as well as a scepticism for the perfection of your own perceived knowledge, you can develop a healthy attitude to debate around here - at least that's my experience and I thought you might benefit from thinking about it.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

It was a model, he was not lied to. The caption is to a photograph which was omitted from the document you read. It was of a 3D model of Lucy that was displayed at the Houston Natural History museum. It had hair and flesh and skin. The thing that came to Houston from Ethiopia that was to go on display were the actual bones of Lucy as the article clearly states.

The full Gould quote is

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Moreover, "fact" does not mean "absolute certainty." The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

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Gould was simply saying that since we can't say anything is 100% certain we have to view the word 'fact' as meaning something else otherwise it is meaningless. The full article can be read here.

To be fair, nobody is suggesting that the statement 'life on earth has changed significantly over a long time' is an obvious fact. It's still a fact nevertheless. The distance to Andromeda is a fact, but it is far from obvious.Acceleration due to gravity seems like an obvious fact, but it took thousands of years of civilization before anyone even described it!I'm sure there are plenty of historical facts which are on much less certain ground than the fact that hominids have gone through significant changes over the past 5 million years.Evolution is a fact, the amount of evidence that indicates life on earth has changed over time is immense...there is more evidence of that fact than there is evidence of the height of nwr's desk. Certain parts of natural history may be disputable, but the overall pattern of natural history is rock solid fact. Explaining it, now that's the hard part

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Aside to Modulous: I own a 25 year-old copy of Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes.

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Nice: I often wonder what happen to Gould's clear style (even if you disagree with him it was quite easy to follow him) when he wrote Structure of Evolutionary Theory which I have around here somewhere.