15 Jan 2014: "science consists in grouping facts to that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them" Darwin autobiography
In a gravel pit of what probably was glacial till (sediment) a worker claims to have found a tropical shell. Sedgwick dismisses this claim as nonsense because it went against what was known about the origins of the material in the area. The ability to predict observations against a background of derived laws (theories) struck Darwin as being extremely powerful. Such is the nature of science. Though we've replaced "law" with "theory" this is still how we think of science.
Theories are generally accepted explanations. Accepted because they create hypotheses and hypotheses generate predictions and testing predictions is what scientists do. For the rest of Darwin's life, this is how Darwin approached science.
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