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.
Isn't this idea of heritability somehow related to Lamarckianism? If so, it's already been tried and found wanting. But then, maybe there's a new way to take a go at the general idea???
marron, I feel the same way. The more I learn, the more my wonder increases -- and the more I appreciate how very little I really do know, compared to what there is to know.... Thank you so very much for your two beautiful, elegant posts....
Aristotillian placemarker (it either marks a place, or does NOT mark a place)
two many typos. I was in a hurry
:-)
I am intensly interested in these subjects, spent alot of years thinking AI, finally abandoned any attempts.
I second that.
Someone is confusing a backwards determination of what could have happened using the "laws" and the conditions as they now exist, with a deterministic outcome of indeterminate initial conditions. If all this were truly deterministic we'd know where all the dark energy and mass is.(and everything else about the universe)
Please do not attribute ideas to me that I have not supported. Your posting is dishonest and insulting in the extreme. Likewisy you cheapen the concept of religion by such attributions.
When I was teaching, the same anti-science comments came from both religious fundamentalist, post modernist liberal arts students, and new age hippies (and a few Luddites). Their actions and beliefs were essentially the same with regard to scientific inquiry.
The authors (Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos) do show a lack of knowledge of chemistry. People do live and work in high-oxygen atmospheres commonly. None of them have ever spontaneously caught fire. Likewise, people live from at altitudes from the Death Valley to the Andes. The oxygen partial pressures (which is what counts in metabolism) vary drastically over these altitudes.
These people's work has nothing to do with information theory as used in communications engineering. Popular literature often has confuses these two.
There is a problem with the word "information" used in context of "information theory and molecular biology". It has a very specific meaning whereas "information" has a very generalized, common usage.
Perhaps we ought to coin a mneumonic for it when we have these discussions. How about something like Cellcom?
Overman doesn't seem to grasp the difference between uniqueness and necessity.
One problem is that some people like to use the word "information" in various contratictory ways (in the same essay) in order to confuse these issues. Much of the stuff from "Discovery Institute" is of this nature. Similarly for the term "complexity." I see no reason to attribute honesty to those who do this intentionally.
You said: Isn't this idea of heritability somehow related to Lamarckianism? If so, it's already been tried and found wanting. But then, maybe there's a new way to take a go at the general idea???
What I'm speaking of is not any message itself nor the mechanism which supports successful biological communication (information). The life is not "in" either of these.
The life is in the communicating within the cell and between the cell and its environment, i.e. the "information" (Shannon paraphrased as successful communication).
My thinking is that - as a matter of protocol - the investigators ought to prove that the communicating is passed along through reproduction and is not "jump started" in each new cell.
I do believe it is important on these kinds of threads to agree to definitions as early as possible. Without qualifiers or definitions, the words "information" and "complexity" are much too generalized to be communicative.
My point about time and space being compressed into a singularity is this:
Then, design and purpose become sort of moot.
We can take a violin and put it in a case and keep it there for years. Perhaps in times to come, somebody might look at it and ask "What is the purpose?"
And no words could ever tell him. As long as the violin remains in the case, it cold never be truly understood.
But if the fellow hears the music even once, just once, it becomes clear. And it is an understanding that words or science can never convey.
So the purpose is in the doing, not in the being.
Been watching movies all week, my local vid store is getting rid of all the VHS, now, it's "The Rainmaker" with Katherine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster. One of the most underrated films of all time, I love this movie!
Thank you for the clarification!
well, your own words, defending science as absolute an seperate from my God fits me into the realm of reason that you feel science is entirely the only truth. you feel this so much that the simple THOUGHT of combining it with my God is heratic!
im sorry, but for someone so practiced in the dogma of science, you fail to realize thats exactly what it is. dogma. you are simply blindly accepting what other scientists claim as the Truth, while ignoring the big freakin loophole in your arguements. your Communion is the practice of denouncing all religion simply because YOU didn't arrive to the conclusion first. you feel the name of your god is Math, and you reject that the laws of Math didnt simply happen, they were put into place!
i stand by what i said. in your ignorance, you reject God for a lesser truth, and so, as a result, you get a portion of the picture. according to your picture you are correct, but you still dont explain WHAT life is, or WHY, or even completely HOW.
a good backing for my logic is that a small child who will blindly accept what you say as true simply by you being a mentor, can still open up the wrong conclusion.
"Why is the sky blue?"
"Light from the Sun refracts around the air"
"Why does it do that?"
"Thats how light works"
"Why?"
and bingo, you have (unless you want to explain light is a wave to a child, in which case you have one more "why" to go anyway before you come to this.....)
you have no final answer. you provide no final answer. you rely on simple blind faith that my God cannot exist.
and you call ME the fool.
How about sticking with "alive" and "dead" to describe the conditions in question? Those words are already well-understood. Thus we avoid fuzzy words that untintentionally may, of themselves, suggest the presence of non-existent complexities.
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