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.
Now, now, BB [image of PH wagging finger]. Let's not do that again, or I'll have to send you to your room.
I didn't like the guy's argument. Not because of his conclusions, but because his work is laden with fallacies. I found that buried deep in his complex verbiage were errors that snuck in all kinds of conclusions that he later pulled out of his hat. Each time he announced one of his interim "conclusions," I found myself asking: "Where that that come from?" As I read through his prose, I found several such issues. But it's a great deal of work, and it takes time, to dig into a swamp like that and to describe his problems with clarity. I don't have the time.
I'm not asking you to accept my word for anything. And it's really not fair for me to wave his stuff aside and ask you to trust me. So I won't do that. But please, let's have no more of this "I suppose logic isn't to your liking" stuff. You're much better than that.
If Overman actually had a logical proof of something, if he had anything more than a sack of multisyllabic smoke, I would be the first to recognize it and to tell you so.
No, I have never said that.
... your Communion is the practice of denouncing all religion...
Nor have I done this. You continue be dishonest in your posting.
LOL at the finger wagging, Patrick! Can we just agree to cordially disagree? Of course I recognize you're eminently entitled to your own reasoned views of these matters. Thanks for taking the time to engage in this debate.
Thanks for the reference. I finally found the papers (they were in a supplement and not in the regular journal.) The papers show that self-organized-complexity arises from more models than I first thought.
IOW, if the question is the “origin of life” then one must first have an understanding of what life is.
This is the epistemological failure of the biological sciences (Pattee). Physics and math do not make this error and thus have asked the question and answered that “life” is information (Shannon paraphrased, successful communication).
The broad application of the term surprised me. It appears I may need to define the term when I use it in these discussions to avoid confusion when changing application, e.g. from biology to geology, etc.
What they all have in common is that an object built up of small locally interacting parts gives rise to system with longer range interactions.
One simple (easy to program) object can be generates like this: (it's probably not really that complex, though)
1. Start with an equilateral triangle P1, P2, P3.
2. Pick a randomly place point in the plane P0.
3. Choose one of the triangle's points at random P_j, j=1 or 2 or 3 randomly.
4. Draw a point half way between P0 and P_j. Make this the new P0.
5. Go to 3.
Of course.
How does a point become a plane?
P0 is the point. I should have said pick a point P0 in the plane determined by P1, P2, and P3.
It's quite possible that asking what life is and what non- life is, is equivalent to asking what a clock is, as opposed to a non-clock.
Is there some minimum list of attributes for clockness? Is a stick in the ground a clock?
There are two positions being presented on this thread. One is the traditional scientific model, which argues that life is an emergent property of matter, and the traditional dualistic model, which posits the requirement of a vital force in addition to matter.
I would argue, as I have consistently on these threads, that arguing for a vital force makes unwarranted assumptions about the limitations of matter. I think we are abit beyond the age of billiard ball determinism. What age we are actually in is a bit of a mystery, but simply dismissing "materialism" as something limited in scope in, in my opinion, shortsighted.
"Life" may not be so much a property as a convient label, as your "clock" example shows.
I would like to see a definition of life that does not require an interpreting observer.
Well, my point was to show that there are a lot of hidden assumptions in such a simple program.
What is a plane, point, halfway, draw, triangle, random, and equilateral?
So if I poke a stick into bat guano inside of Carlsbad Caverns, I have a clock?
However, in different applications, the significance of rules and randomness may likewise be different. Thus my recommendation that we define the term more specifically if such aspects have a bearing in the debate.
Any presumption at all in a scientific inquiry of "origins of life" would IMHO be very much wrong-headed. Possible causation for information (Shannon paraphrased as successful communication) is not limited to either biochemical or God. Other potential sources to be falsified would include the sun, space aliens and inter-dimensional dynamics.
I do not doubt that "clockness" can be defined mathematically much like "information" is defined for molecular biology. But I'm not aware of any such investigation. "Time" however is very much in continual investigation and "clocks" are significant to all such inquiries.
But in the case at hand, "information" is more akin to "time" than to "clocks". "Clocks" would be more akin to the "molecules" in this discussion.
I'm sure it can, but I suspect the results would result in an equally circular definition.
The point of a man-made clock is to parallel the natural (apparent) motion of the sun. Thus a clock in a bat cave would provide essentially the same information as the stick in the ground in sunlight. But in both cases, the clockness is provided by the observer. It is a construct, as is the construct of information.
But, er, the definition of "information" in reference to "information theory and molecular biology" is not circular. Here it is again:
--- Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Part III, section 20, number 3
Being a mathematical Platonist, I would assert that all such mathematical structures are existents. But even if you are Aristotlean in your thinking, the elapse is the constant of the inquiry - the device or message or sender/receiver is variable.
Well, if you were a lawyer, Patrick, you could probably have a field day with this guy in court! That would be interesting to see. :^)
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