Posted on 05/12/2006 12:13:47 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
In his op-ed "Evolution's bottom line," published in The New York Times (May 12, 2006), Holden Thorp emphasizes the practical applications of evolution, writing, "creationism has no commercial application. Evolution does," and citing several specific examples.
In places where evolution education is undermined, he argues, it isn't only students who will be the poorer for it: "Will Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are less likely to learn evolution?" He concludes, "Where science gets done is where wealth gets created, so places that decide to put stickers on their textbooks or change the definition of science have decided, perhaps unknowingly, not to go to the innovation party of the future. Maybe that's fine for the grownups who'd rather stay home, but it seems like a raw deal for the 14-year-old girl in Topeka who might have gone on to find a cure for resistant infections if only she had been taught evolution in high school."
Thorp is chairman of the chemistry department at the University of North Carolina.
Thanks.
Are you a fan of Japanese pro wrestling? I was just watching a great match between Bret hart and Tiger Mask the other day!
LOL! I have friends in Japan, some of whom are "puroresu" fans. They gave me my user name! Of course, they all have a crush on Manami Toyota. What a babe!
That seems to be true. My evolution ping list has over 370 people on it. I doubt that there are more than 2 or maybe 3 dozen on the creationism lists. They never disclose figures.
or Darwin's theory of natural selection in particular...
Well, that's not saying much. Even the Discovery Institute accepts natural selection, and most of the creationists accept what they call "micro evolution." But they go through the wildest anti-scientific gyrations to draw the line there and reject all evidence that would take them farther.
What they have is a problem with the likes of leftists such as Eugenie Scott, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, who either either bluntly and honestly or subtly and sneakily push the "Blind Watchmaker thesis" and see Darwin's theory of natural selection as a "universal acid".
Are they leftists? Could be. I really don't know. However, the theory of evolution is one thing, and the extraneous views of a few scientists are another. One can always find scientists (or clergymen) who say odd things. Einstein was a socialist. But we overlook that when we deal with his scientific work, and we don't claim that all physicists are socialists.
I mean, Thomas Sowell makes the point that one Hayek's unplanned order need not be extended into a metaphysics to be accepted as economics.
I'm not familiar with Sowell's essay on that. But I agree, it doesn't need to be extended there. Yet, it happens to work out in biology quite nicely.
It's true that many of the Founders were rationalist Deists, but they believed the argument from design to be an aid to science ...
Darwin published his work three generations after the time of the Founders. We have no idea what they would have thought of his work. I doubt that men like Franklin and Jefferson would have rejected it. But we just don't know, do we?
And as for Bertrand Russell and his "firm foundation of unyielding despair," I'm not familiar with it, but he has (or had) his opinions, you have yours, I have mine, etc. Not particularly relevant to anything we're discussing here, really.
This might explain some of your asperity, if only by frustration in dealing with her ;-)
Not a slam on her, just an off-beat remark.
Cheers!
Are you referring to Chmielnicki? FYI, he was Ukrainian.
There was Jedwabne during the second world war, carried out under the supervision of Germans.
Then there was Kielce, staged by the NKVD.
Am I missing something?
No, it wasn't. Portugal was an indepedent state, and had its own Inquisition.
Okay, I'm not quite correct. The Hapsburgs ruled Portugual simultaneously with Spain from 1580-1640, which also happened to be the most intense period of the Portuguese inquisition. I was under the impression that it was the Hapsburgs who initiated, persecution of Jews, but upon further research I find that it began while the natives were still ruling Portugaul. The only caveat is that the Spanish exerted a lot of influence over the Portuguese crown. The Jewish encylopedia claims the first Jewish expulsion order came at the insitance of King Manuel's wife, who was a Spanish princess.
They were expelled, as they were from Prague, and Spain.
Okay. I'm not sure what I'm arguing anymore. I guess I was just trying to say that Jews weren't being persecuted always and everywhere in Europe. There were episodes of persecution, and episodes of prosperity, of varying frequency.
Saying persecution was the exception is too strong, I admit, and I retract it.
Ah, yes, but I wasn't prompting him to do it, see the discussion below.
For the nonce, there are some interesting analogies to "Mom! Jake's jumping on the couch!" and Biblical inspiration and/or inerrancy. If God did not dictate scripture word for word, but only said, "Tell everyone I said 'do not kill' " then there would be lotsa room for misunderstanding without fabrication, just as their is with children...
One might justly take the position that you can't have a sucker-punch without first having a sucker, but only a cynic would call that Christian.Just got to reading this post while searching for one of donh's replies to me.
Start (for example) at the late jec41's post 273 in this thread, in which he was encouraged by ThomasWest (apparently a fellow atheist, given the favorable reference to FFRF).
Skooz in post 275 attempted to refute him with a link to National Review Online; which is hardly goading him, as NRO is more or less a bona fide conservative site, and not primarily concerned with the crevo debate.
In 279 jec41 on his own raises the stakes, citing widespread American support for the Nazis among Christians pre-WW II.
It is in 310 that jec41 started extensively quote-mining Mein Kampf, and in 318 was trolling so badly that jwalsh07 in post 318 called him a loon.
In 333 curiousity provided a countervailing set of Hitler quotes to refute jec41; for which he was corrected on the origin of his source by RightWingProfessor.
There are many comments afterwards, and I only entered the fray at post 479, quoting from a source (and giving the title and ISBN number) which wasn't yet in dispute.
As you say, but people on these threads regularly and earnestly advance the position that evolution is connected to/caused by/results from Nazism, but I've never once seen such a rebuke.
Check the posts 420 by furball4paws, the reply in 432 by curiosity, and mjolnir's 438 (intellectual refutation, not rebuke).
In the mind of the layperson, at first blush, eugenics, the concept of a Master Race, and survival of the fittest are all easily conflated, and could reasonably be supposed to flow from one another. But plausibility is not sufficient to support the accusation.
Please re-read the entire thread before jumping to conclusions.
Cheers!
Sure, they're leftists--- just listen to them on Bush; they aren't criticizing him from the right. I think they use natural selection as a way to attack religion more so than to educate people. I mean, the NCSE doesn't do anything to actually teach science other than go on about ID--- it's not like what you do where you have general science threads as well and promote biological discoveries apart from this issue or whatever you might call it. It seems to me that the leftism of Dennett, Dawkins and Scott tends to envelop their Darwinism-- animating the anims of Dawkins and Dennett against religion, for instance.
Why I think statements like Russell's are interesting and relevant comes in part from what Dennett has this to say in Darwin's Dangerous Idea:
Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything! The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you some how came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea -- Darwin's idea -- bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.
Darwin's idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers -- welcome or not -- to question in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in the other direction). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn't that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down? And if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own "real" minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin's idea thus also threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.
That's an interesting interpretation of Darwin's idea. As far as I know, Dennett is not thought of as a nut or on the fringe. The idea that our conscious identity is a mere epiphenomenon, that our "divine spark" is an illusion, is a serious implication to draw from Darwin, thuse the title of his book. Conservative notions about there being a knowable objective morality are pretty much in smoke according to it.
Darwin had his own version of his theory as acid. He's less certain of it melting through the concept of God than Dennett, but he also seems to be drawn to a deeper skepticism than Dennett's own. If Darwin intuition about not trusting an evolved monkey's mind is correct, it would seem our our intuitions are not trustable. If so, our moral intuitions are not trustable, either, and we are in the same place as with Dennett:
You would not probably expect any one fully to agree with you on so many abstruse subjects; and there are some points in your book which I cannot digest. The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this. Not to mention that many expect that the several great laws will some day be found to follow inevitably from some one single law, yet taking the laws as we now know them, and look at the moon, where the law of gravitation-and no doubt of the conservation of energy-of the atomic theory, etc. etc., hold good, and I cannot see that there is then necessarily any purpose. Would there be purpose if the lowest organisms alone, destitute of consciousness existed in the moon? But I have had no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.* But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
Sorry if I got too far off topic, though--- this is just my second day posting, and I'll try to be more focused in the future. Thanks for the civilzed conversation--- see you!
OK, which of the atheists on this thread is going to carry those texts to Abu Dhabi or Qom or Mecca to help spread the "Good News that there is No Allah"TM?
Cheers!
Yup-- tough, too!
Well, we'll pray for HIM, then ;^)
(I'm SO confuser....)
Eh? Interesting, about Russian birth rates, but so what? We're talking about why nature might arm one with certain sexual instincts, which would be to help us survival in small, isolated tribes on a veldt.
Try re-reading the following posts in this thread:
Your post in which you ask:
"Since this means most human sex does not bear fruit, recreational sex should have been eliminated from the gene pool long ago, according to your spartan prescription for genetic survival, right?"
My reply in post 604, in which I say:
"Depends on the extent to which it is practiced. Consider the population statistics for Russia and Western Europe for example."
Your post 612 in which you respond:
You have some statistics on the relative frequency of recreational vs. procreative sex in Russia and Western Europe? How was it gathered?
And my response in post 656.
THAT is why I was talking about Russian birthrates. It is true (see post 616 for example) other topics concerning homosexuality came up, (somewhere you referred me to Red Queen strategies), and I will be glad to discuss them if you wish, but these were NOT the only references to homosexuality in our discussion.
Cheers!
I agree FULLY here!
There is SO much that we don't know (and probably CAN'T know) this side of Heaven!
I agree FULLY here!
There is SO much that we don't know (and probably CAN'T know) this side of Heaven!
Well... DUH??
Just how many times have you Evo's posted that the POPE is ok with 'the Theory', so, by implication, the REST of us 'christians' should roll over and accept it?
Some agnostics can, some can't. Your call entirely.
Cheers!
Well... HAVE YOU!?!?!?!?
We've NEVER seen a post where you've said you've quit; therefore we can only assume.....
--EvoDude
It looks like Europe is going to have to crusade again if they want to get rid of their problems with the Muslims!
HMMmmm....
Is THIS why I get looked down upon 'til the folks figger out I'm male?
"Power flows from the barrel of a gun."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.