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.
That is due to your increasing blindness. If I am not relevant, don't answer. But my comments will still mean something to those who are not so blind as you. Remember, there are highly conserved regions of DNA that natural selection cannot explain.
Are you suggesting that people who fail to become president are failures in life? You guys are just full of hateful rhetoric on this thread.
No. You need to revisit logic 101.
Not to be too technical, But if it weren't for the gravitational pull of the sun those undersea vents would have frozen up and died a long time ago, So technically yes even those creatures are getting their energy from the sun.
Life on Europa might be a different story.
If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species...
Geez... What is it about you that can't read? Change and selection are not the same process. Change does not occur because of selection or in order to meet the requirements of selection. Change occurs for a number of different reasons, some of which we underrstand and some of which we don't. Changes can result in elimination from the reproductive pool, enhanced reproductive capacity, or they can be neutral in their effect on reproduction. What is so hard about understanding that?
Changes do happen to individuals, and yes, it is possible for individuals to undergo change prior to conception, during conception, or to pass on mutations that occur during adulthood.
And what is it about you that you can't understand. The reason he rejects whatever is due to the necessity of natural selection acting on whatever. That is his theory.
Selection does not need to explain anything that is irrelevant to the survival and reproduction of the individual. There is a catch 22 is this for you. If the conserved regions have some currently unknown function, then their preservation could be the result of selection. If not, then they could be an artifact of a generalized error correction mechanism. If this is the case, we would expect to find varying lengths of conserved strings (a possibility you refuse to address). I refer you back to my discussion of digital copying with error correction. In a massive stream of data, simple error correction mechanisms will preserve vast percentages of data over many generations, even in the absense of selection. The presence of long preserved strings means nothing.
Before I comment, I will give you a chance to reconsider what you said here.
The biologists gasped for absolutely no reason. Yeah right, and polar bears naturally live at the equator.
You really need to calm down. Darwin says NOTHING about the source or cause of change. What he says is that selection, over time, benefits the species whose individuals are selected; not some unrelated species. He says NOTHING about change that is selection neutral.
I have addressed this numerous times. Your lack of understanding does not refute the E-value.
Godly character leads to trust and respect. Reagan allowed God to work through him on a regular basis. A great man because he honored God.
Don't project. And you still need to gain understanding. He need not say anything about the source of the change. He rejected whatever because natural selection could not act on it.
You have posted the same joke several times, a joke that suggests Christians are smarter than PhDs (disregarding the possibility that a PhD might be a Christian). Your joke is irrelevant to the discussion, and it is a poorly disguised personal attack on several Freepers.
Now let me back up a bit and try to understand the point of your little joke. I assume you are trying to say that education doesn't confer wisdom and doesn't guarantee the ability to solve simple problems. OK, that's a given. Now make your point concrete. What is it that you know about science that 150 years of biology has missed?
So you are resting your case on the existence of strings data that have not been corrupted during generations of replication? Is this it? I'm trying to understand.
I have no magic bullet to shoot this down. I'm just trying to understand whether this is the heart of your argument.
Yes, you announced back in 288 what he said and it's wrong.
He realized that in his day much of the world had not been geologically examined. Thus, much would be found later that had not been found in his day.
He also realized that what had been so far observed in England, Europe, and (to a lesser extent) in the Americas would remain the rule. The geologic column is made of the remants of brief periods of deposition, snapshots in time which occur between relatively long periods of erosion.
Want to know what you're talking about? You've already announced what Darwin said. Here, check out Chapter 10 to see if you're right. Don't make me read it to you. There'll be a quiz later, how's that?
Let's make a little bet. Nowhere on this thread will you at any time muster the integrity to admit that what you said in 288 was flat-out wrong. I have to wonder what Saint Tom would think of you borrowing his mantle to wear on these threads. Maybe he'd approve, but many would say you're just getting it all dirty.
There's a difference between the fossil record "not containing every transitional form that ever lived" and a fossil record that uniformly exhibits stasis within species.
While you're at it, learn something about the current state of theory and the evidence. That's where Darwin's a bit out of date.
Smooth Change in the Fossil Record.
Where did the necessity come from? The necessity follows from the theory, but the necessity contradicts the fossil evidence.
The theory is common descent, yes. As a useful scientific theory instead of a Sunday School lesson, it makes predictions. It predicts that (paleontological) faunal succession and in the current variety of life on Earth are the results of a branching phylogenetic tree of real common descent. Thus, all the current and known fossil branches are or at least were connected by unobserved forms. That's the underlying phenomenon: an unbroken chain of descent from some distant root to all parts of the tree.
Know something? Everything we've ever found further outlines such a tree. How did Darwin know that would keep on happening? You haven't dealt with that: Darwin being the luckiest charlatan of the 19th century. Heck! He's the luckiest ever. What are stupid you-can't-make-me-see-the-evidence tricks against the luck of predicting Precambrian fossils, land-mammal-to-whale intermediates, ape-to-human intermediates, all the transitional series that have been found since the 1860s?
Horse manure.
I repeat. BLAST is used everyday to make judgements in biology. It is statistically based. You do not understand that. Your lack of understanding does not matter to the scientists who use this tool every day.
Overlooking the obvious doesn't make someone dumb. Just stubborn.
I guess this is why evolution is still a "theory".
There is no proof that evolution or creation either one ever took place.
However, I defy anyone to prove to me that a simple blade of grass just "happened" to appear one day.
If anyone can prove that beyond any reasonable doubt, then I will look seriously at whether or not an entire Universe just "Happened" to appear.
When they do this, then we can all go out and buy plastic, glass, fiberglass and metal and put them into a large bag. In oh... 20 million years or so, that stuff should morf into a Pentium computer.
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