Biology textbook should’ve say “As of today we think that photosynthesis started at so and so date.”
This would do more for science than anything else.
That saves an enormous load of weasel words, while also helping people understand what science actually is.
Edit:
Your comment rubbed me the wrong way, and I think I know why. It presumes people are too dumb to learn how to read things, but they’re not. Fantasy novels don’t preface every sentence like “in this fictional universe, Frodo handed the ring to Samwise. And then, for pretend, let’s say they ate some breakfast.” Readers would loathe that. Yes, we know this is all made-up. It’s a fictional work. It’s implicit in the name.
Well, science works are no different. “Science” implies “current understanding”. That’s fundamental to it. If we discover a better theory of something tomorrow, we’ll adopt future textbooks to describe that as our new model of that thing. You don’t need to weasel every sentence with “today, we think that…” because it’s implicit in the fact that it’s science writing, just like “it didn’t really happen” is implicit in fiction, and “as far as we know…” is implicit in a newspaper. Rather than “fix” those genres, we should educate people on how to read them.
Have you talked to average people, out of the HN bubble? They are often too dumb to read at all, period.
Some people need to understand science is never exact. Like you are saying, they should understand it isn't exact.
Then others are like, since it isn't exact, then it isn't real.
I've heard arguments that since Climate Models have some range of error, then it isn't real, "see, there is some uncertainty". Climate change isn't real, because the models have some error. So for these people you need to be more forcefully confident in the predictions since they can't handle the nuance in discussing error ranges.
but I disagree, by changing the wording we are implicitly teaching them what science means.
Thing is, changing the wording makes it more tedious to consume for more knowledgeable readers. It's not like we can tweak a few phrases to make it universally better with no drawbacks.
Lot of pedantic STEM people will waffle and be like, "yeah, it isn't 100%, I can't commit", or "I'm not 100% confident".
Then the non-STEM run with it and say it isn't going to happen. "Well, they didn't seem that concerned".
Adding the qualification bring some honesty to the writer for the reader. There was a lot of discussion around Covid that was shut down, because people were assuming that the science was, in fact, a truth, and not a theory or even a hypothesis.
There are stromatolite colonies that still exist today, in Australia for example. When students are taught about the history of earth, they're taught such cyanobacteria were among the first if not THE first to produce oxygen en masse through photosynthesis. This was never based on fossil finds but on other evidence. So the paper isn't anything groundbreaking, it's another piece in the puzzle if we accept their images show fossilized thylakoids.
I'm not just talking about the "trust the science" mantra that arose during Covid in response to politically-motivated conspiracy theories. That's one instance of a more general phenomenon.
We of course don't really know anything that happened billions of years ago. We have some good ideas about it, and data consistent with those ideas, and a lack of data inconsistent with those ideas. That's all we have, and that's all we will ever have. The ideas and data might improve over time (as well as things like computational techniques for using the data), but until we can actually travel back in time we can't ever know anything beyond that.