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 state’s 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 Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s 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.
It doesn't.
each 0 must account for every two 9's.
Say what?
Its value is i. If you want it in vector form, it's (0,1).
"value" is an amount or numeric quantity, a representation of an amount is just that, a representation.
Exactly the same is true of the value of the number represented by the symbol "2".
Dr. Hamming's name is familiar to many people in computer science as the inventor of Hamming Codes, a method of doing error-detection-and-correction on noisy data channels.
1-.9=.1
1-.99=.01
1-.999=.001
etc...
every 0 is accountable for at least one other 9, thus only when it is infinite, and not a whole number, does it work.
interesting, but "i" represents TWO values coexisting, not a single value in the real sense.
though i give you credit for also helping my point. as far as algebra is concerned, it cannot be answered. as for geometry and calculus, it can be explained, but no single unit is held.
this is what i meant by "1+1=2 is a theory"
other studies do not come to the same conclusion, as each study uses a different reasoning, even though they are all mathematical.
When read without the leading of the indwelling Spirit, the Scriptures are much like any manuscript and readers employ the same tools and methods to do their research.
But when the Spirit indwells, the words come alive within the one reading: the eyes scan effortlessly over the written words while the Spirit brings the meaning alive within and compels the reader to other passages. There is no need to memorize or to study it like a manuscript, because the Spirit leads.
That unique property is the authentication of Scripture v ancient but uninspired manuscripts.
Don't know, but he's been spamming me with freepmail. I think he mistook me for someone who cared about his peosonal problems.
Yup. :-)
A Hamming code is a block code. Other block codes include Golay, BCH, and Reed-Solomon. Interesting side note is that the error correction on a CD player is Reed-Solomon.
One can only hope it is more coherent than what he's posted to the thread.
Less.
Could this be an avatar of Archimedes Plutonium?
Hamming used to visit me when he was in town, mostly to chat about things in his article "Mathematics on a Distant Planet." He made some interesting points such as "Does it make a engineering if functions used in airplane design are Lebesgue integrable rather than just Riemann integrable. Would you fly on a plane if it did?"
(Of course, I told him I was computing to get some insight into how big my numbers were.)
Yes, boys and girls, wherever reason dares to rear its head, the Lone Troll is there, to distract the dialogue, to nitpick, to divert the thread with trivia. And when he can, he gets posts deleted. This is truly heroic. Sometimes, if all goes well, he can get an entire thread moved to the backroom. Oh, how glorious!
You may sleep soundly, boys and girls, because the Lone Troll will be there to protect you from the evils of rational thought.
Now there is a name I have not heard in a while. :-)
More airtight "deductive" logic.
I would never present anything of mine as airtight. But when I engage in sarcasm, I don't deny it.
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