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Biology 9 Online
OpenStudy (anonymous):

How are laws and theories similar? How are they different?

OpenStudy (anonymous):

Please help me. I have no idea

OpenStudy (anonymous):

Law is a statement basically

OpenStudy (anonymous):

theory is an explaination to that statement

OpenStudy (rushwr):

A theory is a general principle that has been developed to explain a wide variety of phenomena. A theory is NOT a wild guess. It must be consistent with known experimental results and it must have predictive power. As new knowledge is gained, theories are refined to better explain the data. A law is a mathematical relationship that is consistently found to be true.

OpenStudy (rushwr):

I hope it helped @yojoe731 :)

OpenStudy (anonymous):

Thanks @Rushwr; A theory proposes to explain a phenomena. It is based on observable evidence, and can still survive with contradictory evidence, although not for long. A law just says that a phenomena exists. It needs to match all observable data. eg. Newton’s Law of Gravity basically just tells us that the phenomenon of gravity exists, and does things, but the theory of evolution tells us that life has diversity /because/ of reasons, and here are the reasons. ('Phenomena'; literally 'thing'. Sometimes smart words are dumb.)

OpenStudy (rushwr):

ikr .. No problem :)

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