Evolution: fact or theory? (Or fact AND theory?)

In reviewing Richard Dawkins's latest book on evolution, a noted science reporter, Nicholas Wade, recently charged that Dawkins--aka Darwin's Rottweiler--fails to grasp the difference between a fact (the existence of a fossil trail, for example) and a theory (a proposed explanatory apparatus, in this case evolution). To Dawkins, Wade wrote, evolution is

a concept as bulletproof as a mathematical theorem, even though it can't be proved by rigorous logical proofs. He seems to have little appreciation for the cognitive structure of science. Philosophers of science, who are the arbiters of such issues, say science consists largely of facts, laws and theories. The facts are the facts, the laws summarize the regularities in the facts, and the theories explain the laws. Evolution can fall into only one of these categories, and it's a theory.

If philosophers of science are indeed the arbiters of such disputes, then this case has already been to arbitration--and Wade lost. In response to that review, philosophers of science, not to mention others, wrote to the New York Times Book Review in droves. And they sided overwhelmingly with Dawkins.

Some appear to have been prodded into action by the studiously neutral final lines of Wade's review, which they saw as journalistic on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-ism run amok: "Creationists insist evolution is only a theory, Dawkins that it's only a fact. Neither claim is correct."