re: #207 wheat-dogg

The popular understanding of “theory” and the scientific definition of theory are totally different. It’s more a question of common language misusing the scientific term, than a new definition.

Putting it another way, the popular understanding of the word gay may have changed, but the definition of a scientific theory has not.

But the religious wingnuts are trying to change it from its colloquial definition (a wild-ass conspiracy) to conflate it to mean the same thing as a scientific theory (they are all wild-ass conspiracies) - in other words, they are trying to obliterate the scientific definition.

See global anthropogenic climate change - a well-founded scientific theory which is conspiracy to a whole bunch of wingnuts (and my previous example of evolution). Both are sometimes conflated with either “guess” or “religion” now, and a whole bunch of people believe those characterisations.