Yes, and = I = said, they just hadn't used the word gravity, yet? What?
laughable by modern scientific standards
More superstition. What's so great about article bloat, lack of referees, junk science and more junk science, and so on? Modern? The technology is much improved. And there are still great minds. But the minds of the Bell Labs journal on black bodies, information theory, and the rest, were perhaps even a cut above many 'great thinkers' today. Still - who knows?
Did I say no natural selection? NO.
That's the choice you have to make. Is evolution simply a force of nature, or something which might be explained? Is it caused, and can one discern that cause(s)? Natural selection is a partial attempt. Chance. Mutation. Etc.
If it is something which might be explained, then one needs a theory of evolution, or however many theories you like. But at least one. How would you state it - word for word? And then don't get mad if I suspect it might seem incomplete in the eyes of others who believe vaguely as do you in - the thing.
They had used the word gravity, but it hadn't been quantified and explored, but they hadn't used it much in relation to what we now think of as gravity.
No superstition at all, and I'm not talking about article bloat. I'm talking about sample sets too small to be scientifically useful. Look up the Mt Graham squirrel, that's a squirrel that environmentalists "proved" was a seperate species because they "averaged" as slightly larger than squirrels of the same species on different mountains. Of course their sample set was only 12 squirrels, and they did a plain average not a mean average, so if one of them was a fatty it completely skewed their results. That is a classic example of laughable set of data, getting more data wouldn't have created article bloat.
No it isn't the choice I have to make. That's the choice YOU are trying to force upon me by committing the fallasy of the excluded middle. And of course the root of science is to explain forces of nature as not so simple. "Simply a force of nature" is a phrased used by people that don't like science to discourage scientific investigation, it's a way to write things off as not needing investigation. Science believes in investigating everything, that's part of the fun.