Evolution happens. That’s how we got those anti-biotic resistant critters… …”Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.” – Stephen Hawking (A brief history of time)

To which a netfriend responded:

Hawking is absolutely right. The *theory* of evolution could be overturned at any time, when there are *facts* which do so. At present we have a lot of facts, such as the development of resistant bacteria, which continue to support it, just as we have millions of instances of falling apples which continue to support the theory of gravity. What Hawking is saying is that it only takes one apple that *doesn’t* fall to require a radical re-think of gravity, just as you would need only one scientific fact which directly contravenes evolution to call it into question. So far, there are no such facts. Literature, speculation, religious belief and mysticism are not scientific facts.

January 2006