Scientific facts, scientific theories, and dishonest legislators

Here we go again: State senator Daniel Emrich of Montana has introduced yet another bill to curtail the teaching of evolution

Image from thescientificcartoonist.com.

I’ve never liked zombie movies. Well, with the exception of Shaun of the Dead, co-written by the brilliant Simon Peg, who also stars in it. I dislike zombies because they never do anything interesting and yet they keep not dying, by definition.

Some bad ideas are like zombies. No matter how many times you kill them, they keep coming back with a vengeance, ready to eat your brain and turn you in another soldier of the army of the dead. One bad set of related idea is that there is a sharp distinction between scientific facts and scientific theories, that the first ones are objective and ought to be taught to our kids, and that the the latter are mere speculation and should be avoided like they were, well, zombies.

This particular version of the alleged fact / theory distinction is very popular among creationists, who often use it against their main target: the theory of evolution. Though occasionally they also aim at the theory of the Big Bang in cosmology, because why not.

One of my readers alerted me to the latest incarnation of this zombified absurdity: State senator Daniel Emrich of Montana has introduced bill n. LC2215 to once again try to deprive the children of his State of a sound scientific education, thus implicitly nudging them toward the particular kind of nonsense he favors: young-earth creationism.

The bill has been formally introduced on January 30, 2023, and reads almost in toto (I’m leaving out three one-line sections that deal with the details of implementation):

“Whereas, the purpose of K-12 education is to educate children in the facts of our world to better prepare them for their future and further education in their chosen field of study, and to that end children must know the difference between scientific fact and scientific theory; and

Whereas, a scientific fact is observable and repeatable, and if it does not meet these criteria, it is a theory that is defined as speculation and is for higher education to explore, debate, and test to ultimately reach a scientific conclusion of fact or fiction.

Be it enacted by the legislature of the State of Montana:

Requirements for science instruction in schools.

(1) Science instruction may not include subject matter that is not scientific fact.

(2) The board of public education may not include in content area standards any standard requiring curriculum or instruction in a scientific topic that is not scientific fact.

(3) The superintendent of public instruction shall ensure that any science curriculum guides developed by the office of public instruction include only scientific fact.

(4) (a) The trustees of a school district shall ensure that science curriculum and instructional materials, including textbooks, used in the district include only scientific fact.

(b) Beginning July 1, 2025, a parent may appeal the trustees’ lack of compliance to subsection (4)(a) to the county superintendent and, subsequently, to the superintendent of public instruction under the provisions for the appeal of controversies in this title pursuant to 20-3-107 and 20-3-210.

(5) The legislature intends for this section to be strictly enforced and narrowly interpreted.

(6) As used in this section, ‘scientific fact’ means an indisputable and repeatable observation of a natural phenomenon.”

That’s it. What sense can we make of it? Not much.

To begin with, there is no such thing as a scientific fact, per se. Facts are facts, whether they are embedded in daily discourse (“the nearest grocery store is just two blocks away”) or in scientific discourse (“the earliest hominid fossils date to about 7 to 8 million years ago”).

The evolution of the hominid lineage and the separation from the rest of the great apes, image from britannica.com.

Facts, then, are features of the world. (I’m going to leave out abstract “facts,” such as that the square root of 9 is 3, or that an argument in logic may be valid and yet unsound. Let’s keep it simple.) What we make of any given collection of facts gets us into the realm of theory.

For instance, from the fact that the nearest grocery store is just two blocks away I may theorize that we do not find ourselves in a food desert, though that conclusion would be based on a sample size of only one. Similarly, from the fact that the earliest hominid fossils date from 7-8 million years ago I can theorize that human evolution is a rather recent phenomenon in the context of the history of biological systems on our planet.

But the above approach still doesn’t quite get things right, because it makes it appear as if facts and theories were sharply distinct from each other. They aren’t.

Let’s start with commonsense discourse, then move to the scientific one. As we saw, “the nearest grocery store is just two blocks away” counts as a fact about my neighborhood. But there are literally infinite such facts. Not only about which stores are where, but what color and texture characterizes every nook and cranny of the streets and buildings. How many leaves there are on each tree, and how many trees. How the reflective or absorbing surfaces of objects in the neighborhood alter the wavelength of incident light. How many bacteria there are, and of what kind. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

Why, then, are we talking about the location of the closest grocery store rather than about any of the myriad other facts “out there”? Because whenever we consider certain facts we have reasons, and those reasons are rooted in one kind of “theory” or other. I am inquiring about a grocery store because I need groceries, obviously. Less obviously, that’s because I have a model (that is, a theory!) of the distribution of grocery stores in the city, of their function (they distribute food, for a price), of what can be found in them (I need a particular brand of whole wheat pasta), and so on.

In other words, what counts as a fact is not a raw feature of the universe, it’s a feature of human models of and questions about the universe.

The same thing goes, of course, for scientific discourse, only much more so. The fact of the age of the earliest hominids depends on a number of theoretical constructs, including not just the very theory of evolution itself, but also theories in physics (about, say, how radioactive decay allows us to estimate the age of a rock) and in geology (about the succession of strata and how they came about, chronologically and mechanically).

So when senator Emrich defines a scientific fact as “observable and repeatable, and if it does not meet these criteria, it is a theory that is defined as speculation,” he’s talking gibberish.

Some facts are observable but not repeatable, like a particular eclipse of the Sun, for instance. Which I’m going to bet even the good senator would not deny is a fact. It only happens once, no repetition is possible.

Other facts are repeatable but not observable, at least not if “observing” is something that the human eye is supposed to do. The specific patterns of particle collisions detectable inside a massive accelerator are repeatable to a very high degree of accuracy, but in order to be “observed” they require sophisticated instrumentation and a lot of computer calculations. Both of which are based on theory, and without which no observable fact would ever emerge about subatomic particles.

Moreover, a scientific theory is no mere “speculation,” and being speculative is most definitely not the definition of a scientific theory. A speculation is a hunch, a hypothetical proposition that may or may not turn out to be true. Like my speculation that senator Emrich is an educated person who normally knows what he’s talking about.

A scientific theory, instead, is a complex set of propositions constructed on the basis of facts (relevant to that theory), aiming at making coherent sense of those facts, and capable of predicting more such facts.

For example, in the early 19th century astronomers discovered the fact that the orbit of the planet Uranus—then the most remote planet known in the solar system—could not be adequately explained by the dominant theory of physics at the time, Newtonian mechanics.

There seemed to be two possibilities, both rather outrageous on the face of it. On the one hand, Newtonian mechanics ought to be thrown out and replaced with a better theory. After all, it wasn’t working as advertised! On the other hand, perhaps there was an as yet unknown planet outside of the orbit of Uranus, which was responsible for the observed gravitational anomalies (“facts”). But c’mon, a whole new planet that nobody had ever seen before??

Turns out that the second option was the winner. The mathematician Urbain Le Verrier carried out the calculations for the orbit of the unknown planet, on the basis of the observed positions (i.e., facts) of Uranus and of Newtonian theory, and provided the celestial coordinates to Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory. Galle pointed his telescope in the right direction and voilà, Neptune was discovered!

The planet Neptune, discovered in 1846, Wikimedia.

This is how science, at its best, works. Facts and theories are inextricably connected and mutually reinforcing. When Emrich says that “the purpose of K-12 education is to educate children in the facts of our world to better prepare them for their future and further education in their chosen field of study” he is correct. But scientific theories are part and parcel of that sound education that his bill would deny those very children.

It is also more than a bit ironic that the bill states that “science instruction may not include subject matter that is not scientific fact,” considering that Emrich, as well as the Governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, are young-earth creationists, and would very much like the children of their State to be taught that particular type of mythology, which, of course, they consider a fact—in spite of the overwhelming contrary consensus on the part of the scientific community.

So I would argue, again very much contra Emrich, that a sound education for our children ought to include the fuzziness of the distinction between facts and theories, as well as the nature of scientific theories and how they are not at all the same thing as hunches or guesses.

And one more thing: according to the bill “a parent may appeal the trustees’ lack of compliance.” Can we please stop this particular subclass of nonsense? It is a well recognized principle in civilized countries that parents have no business whatsoever dictating to teachers what to teach or not to teach, just as I don’t have any business telling my mechanic how to fix my car, unless I am a mechanic myself. Teachers and mechanics are experts on the subject matter, while parents and drivers are (usually) not. The only concern of a parent ought to be whether their kids are studying and learning, and if not, to try to figure out why—with the help of teachers.

This idea that parents, school boards, and politicians are in the business of micro-managing educators is one of the major reasons the quality of American education has plummeted over the past several decades, especially in places like the State of Montana (or most of the south and midwest, for that matter). We rank 24, worldwide, in both science and reading, and an abysmal 39 in math. And a bill like Montana’s LC2215 just ain’t helping. Please drop it.