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.
I see you work for Microsoft in the QA department.
Does one want to call a mountain range "living"? They do grow, move, emit offspring, etc.
The hills are going somewhere;
They have been on the way a long time.
They are like camels in a line
But they move more slowly.
- Hilda Conkling
No, but everything that Microsoft makes is alive.
In the dead one, the biochemical machinery has ceased to operate.
Dead meat can also have bugs.
Is an anthrax spore alive?
Well, then dead meat with bugs is alive. Dead meat with dead bugs is not alive. But dead meat is not living.
As a software developer, my motto was, If it compiles, ship it.
Unfortunately my environment insisted on variation and selection.
Ewwww. Well, you do meet the shipping date that way.
The phrase was "relatively simple" meaning simple relative to the complex metabolism.
I don't understand. Does this mean that parasites living on a more complex host are not alive? I am not trying to trivialize this question. Life on earth is interconnected, and it makes no sense to me to assert that an entity such as a virus or prion is not alive, simply because it depends on a host for metabolism.
Ichneumon: In the dead one, the biochemical machinery has ceased to operate.
Both of you have prejudiced your verb choice with biochemical causation. But it seems to me that suggesting cause is circular reasoning and thus should not be a factor in answering the question, especially since both the live and dead cells have the same basic chemical composition and DNA.
"Activity" or "operation" are fairly close to "information" but IMHO fall short in that you could shake a dead skin cell like a martini and it would still not be alive. IOW, such activity or operation must be also be autonomous and meaningful. Therefore, I prefer the word I see used most often to describe it: information (successful communication). The dead skin cell has ceased to communicate.
that isnt science, thats morals and philosphy.
"almost" does not = "is"
you think Adam was a Jew? no, Man simply had an understanding of God then. after a few chances to redeem themselves, God laid down the Law and formed the Jewish Nation. thus "salvation" was possible.
if you anti-Creationists like, you can replace "salvation" with "reasoning"
if it exists soemwhere, it must be able to exist with us as well. the idea that we all originated from a single point would lead me to assume here is as good as there.
So what happened in the prior 10,000 years or so of civilization? Was it impossible for salvation in that time? This is a perfectly serious question. An odd one, but serious. God being God, it isn't like there was a shortage of time to introduce one's self. What took so long that it was necessary to condemn millions without so much as an opportunity to even know that God existed?
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