Evolution

[John Dibble]

In the Gabu universe do objects fall up? Do they accelerate at some acceleration which deviates measureably from the formula I posted? Did scientists in your universe not manage interplanetary travel because they could not accurately predict gravity?  If you want to look at the universe on the scale of galaxies you need Einstein's relativity, and if you want to look at subatomic particles you need quantum theory, but in the world in which you and I live the laws of motion developed by Newton 3 centuries years ago are very  accurate and form the basis of virtually all engineering calculations today.

David, gravity is still in the theory stage because we don't have a full understanding of how it works - take for instance ultra-high gravity situations such as the area around a black hole, where it is theorized that time is slowed down relative to our own time progression rate. If we did understand it completely, or at least close enough, it would be called the law of gravity. In science there are three progressions an idea has to go through - hypothesis, theory, and law. Hypothesis indicates what is basically an educated guess based on some basic observations, theory indicates that a hypothesis has gained enough evidence supporting it through experimentation and more thorough observation though not enough for a complete understanding, and law indicates a complete understanding.

We know enough about gravity to call it a theory, and thus we have enough information to work with it in a good deal of situations such as calculating interplanetary courses. We know for a fact that there is force that pulls objects together, and we call it gravity, but we can't state for certain what that fact really is. Evolution is similar in this regard, though not quite as mathematically neat - we have enough information to call it a credible theory, that the basic idea is more than likely true, but we lack a full understanding and thus can't call it the law of evolution.

[John Dibble]

John
If I throw a ball up in the air its velocity and position at any time are quite predictable. If I throw the ball at an angle it will follow a parabolic path and its path is also quite predictable as long as you throw in a few corrections for air resistance. Artillery shells are aimed quite accurately this way. We know these things to be true because we have done countless experiments which show that they are. We have observed the results.

I never denied that, but gravity is still theory. We know the force exists, we just do not have a full explanation for it. For instance, we don't fully understand the mechanism that causes the force to exist in the first place - we only have theories. Sure, you can make calculations using the force of gravity, but I'd bet you could not prove to me with 100% certainty the mechanism by which that force is generated.

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Both are possible, though it's not as simple as 'muck' that the idea where life originally came from(though this is really a seperate thing from the theory of evolution, which only proposes that species change over time through various processes) - that 'muck' was a pool of chemical reactions that supposedly created proteins essential to life. If you really think about it, a lifeform boils down to being a big sack of chemical reactions.

We get evidence for evolution through the fossil record, which is unfortunately imperfect. Combined with comparing similarities between fossils and modern animals, we also have dating methods(which have become more accurate over time) that show these animals are far older than species currently alive - if these species were ever alive at the same time as modern species, there should be fossils of the modern species that could be dated the same age as those others. Based on the evidence, we can conclude that species have changed over time - if they did not, if there is no evolution, since the evidence points to many species not existing on the planet at the same time where then do new species come from?