Hypothesis would certainly be reasonable, in the usual everyday language realm. In the strictly scientific method usage though a hypothesis, to have any real meaning, would have to lend itself to experimental testing and the possibility of falsification. I really wanted to show the distinction between that which is testable by the scientific method, and that which is only approachable by the historical method. There you gather up as many “facts” and “reasonable suppositions” as you can and try a convince other people (or just yourself) that you know what happened. With the historical method you have to acknowledge that people lie, obfuscate important facts, act in unpredictable ways out of personal interest, plant deceptive information, forge documents etc. Early on in this mess I felt the Lab Leak was certainly a distinct possibility and I was thunderstruck at the behavior of a number of scientists trying to humiliate and silence anyone who dared to disagree with the “narrative” they advanced with almost zero evidence to back it up. I don’t forgive them for that and in the future, like Mr. Xi, I wouldn’t turn my back on them if they were 2 days dead.
Would not hypothesis be a better term to describe suggestions of the origin of SAR-CoV-2 instead of theory?
"A theory is a carefully thought-out explanation for observations of the natural world that has been constructed using the scientific method, and which brings together many facts and hypotheses."
Hypothesis would certainly be reasonable, in the usual everyday language realm. In the strictly scientific method usage though a hypothesis, to have any real meaning, would have to lend itself to experimental testing and the possibility of falsification. I really wanted to show the distinction between that which is testable by the scientific method, and that which is only approachable by the historical method. There you gather up as many “facts” and “reasonable suppositions” as you can and try a convince other people (or just yourself) that you know what happened. With the historical method you have to acknowledge that people lie, obfuscate important facts, act in unpredictable ways out of personal interest, plant deceptive information, forge documents etc. Early on in this mess I felt the Lab Leak was certainly a distinct possibility and I was thunderstruck at the behavior of a number of scientists trying to humiliate and silence anyone who dared to disagree with the “narrative” they advanced with almost zero evidence to back it up. I don’t forgive them for that and in the future, like Mr. Xi, I wouldn’t turn my back on them if they were 2 days dead.
Would not hypothesis be a better term to describe suggestions of the origin of SAR-CoV-2 instead of theory?
"A theory is a carefully thought-out explanation for observations of the natural world that has been constructed using the scientific method, and which brings together many facts and hypotheses."
See: https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/what-do-we-mean-theory-science