Posted on 07/04/2004 5:19:27 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
Professor Ernst Mayr, the scientist renowned as the father of modern biology, will celebrate his 100th birthday tomorrow by leading a scathing attack on creationism.
The evolutionary biologist, who is already acclaimed as one of the most prolific researchers of all time, has no intention of retiring and is shortly to publish new research that dismantles the fashionable creationist doctrine of intelligent design.
Although he has reluctantly cut his workload since a serious bout of pneumonia 18 months ago, Prof. Mayr has remained an active scientist at Harvard University throughout his 90s. He has written five books since his 90th birthday and is researching five academic papers. One of these, scheduled to appear later this year, will examine how intelligent design the latest way in which creationists have sought to present a divine origin of the world was thoroughly refuted by Charles Darwin a century and a half ago.
His work is motivated in part by a sense of exasperation at the re-emergence of creationism in the USA, which he compares unfavourably with the widespread acceptance of evolution that he encountered while growing up in early 20th-century Germany.
The states of Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Oklahoma currently omit the word evolution from their curriculums. The Alabama state board of education has voted to include disclaimers in textbooks describing evolution as a theory. In Georgia, the word evolution was banned from the science curriculum after the states schools superintendent described it as a controversial buzzword.
Fierce protest, including criticism from Jimmy Carter, the former President, reversed this.
Prof. Mayr, who will celebrate his 100th birthday at his holiday home in New Hampshire with his two daughters, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, was born on 5 July 1905 in Kempten, Germany. He took a PhD in zoology at the University of Berlin, before travelling to New Guinea in 1928 to study its diverse bird life. On his return in 1930 he emigrated to the USA. His most famous work, Systematics and the Origin of Species, was published in 1942 and is regarded still as a canonical work of biology.
It effectively founded the modern discipline by combining Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendels genetics, showing how the two were compatible. Prof. Mayr redefined what scientists mean by a species, using interbreeding as a guide. If two varieties of duck or vole do not interbreed, they cannot be the same species.
Prof. Mayr has won all three of the awards sometimes termed the triple crown of biology the Balzan Prize, the Crafoord Prize and the International Prize for Biology. Although he formally retired in 1975, he has been active as an Emeritus Professor ever since and has recently written extensively on the philosophy of biology.
Sure there is. They both produce the same results, and provide the identical evidence (fossils, etc.), but one functions naturally, and requires no external agency. The other -- without apparent necessity -- adds the additional feature of an external designer, a designer whose handiwork looks exactly as if it had occurred without a designer, and of whose we have no evidence.
That is not an inconsistency, it is a difference.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise.
No, the question I posed assumed that there was no God, in which case there was no pre-ordained fate. I make the assumuption that the scientist does not believe in God.
Forgive me if I read "the scientist" to mean scientists in general. That's the usual reading of that phrase. If you are asking why one particular scientist doubts the existince of God, you will have to ask him.
I would speculate that the majority of PhD level researchers are not Christian fundamentalists, but that does not make them atheists. Most are merely skeptical of doctrine.
I suggest that the existence of a designer is inconsistent with the non-existence of a designer. In any event, given the absence of evidence for the designer's existence, and given the lack of necessity of a designer's activities to explain the evidence we do have, evidence which abundantly supports the theory of evolution, why entertain a belief in a designer?
You are forgiven. :-). I was too lazy to go back and check the name of the scientist referred to in this article (Mayr) when typing my post. I'll be more careful next time.
But do they accept an afterlife absent any scientific proof?
Sure it is. But is the "non-existence of a designer" part and parcel of evolution? One cannot assent to evolution without also assenting to atheism? I think most evolutionists would disagree. Evolution is not a religious doctrine, it is a biological phenomenon. The existence or non-existence of an original designer (God) would seem to be irrelevant.
In any event, given the absence of evidence for the designer's existence, and given the lack of necessity of a designer's activities to explain the evidence we do have, evidence which abundantly supports the theory of evolution, why entertain a belief in a designer?
I would disagree that there is an absence of evidence for a designer, but that's beside the point, as I was not trying to convince anyone that there is a designer. I was merely stating the fact that observing natural processes can neither prove nor disprove such a thing.
Congratulations!
Looks like you're heading for another 1000 post thread.
The existence or non-existence of a designer (whether the designer is God or some meddling alien) is, as you suggest, irrelevent to evolution, which apparently functions identically either way. Thus, serving no verifiable biological purpose, it's a concept which has no place in the theory of evolution. This doesn't mean that atheism is required for evolution theory (or atomic theory, or relativity theory). Nor is theism required. Theism is a totally separate intellectual activity.
This will make up for a whole bunch that only got around 20 posts.
You know, ever since I took that "wrong turn" in the space-time continuum, I've been trying to do exactly that. Unfortunately, this dead-end, backwoods chunk of dimensional existence is somewhat ... sticky.
I know the way out. First, send me all your money. You won't be needing it anyway. Then I'll send you the directions.
SECOND REQUEST
do you think 0.999... = 1, or not?
Oh, are you into MLM too?
Getting "worked up" is an emotional response not an intellectual one. Work on that. Grammar too.
Just-for-old-times-sake placemarker 999.
I never heard of MLM. Sounds like you're making an obscene pass.
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