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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.
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The problem wouldn't be with my presentation, it would be in convincing the judge, who would probably have an intelligence not much greater the chair in which he sits. By the way, from my swift reading of Overman's argument, he appears to be operating in the so-called Scholastic school of philosophy. It was heavily abstract, and very little involved in dealing with data. It's been criticized over the last few centuries as having been an impediment to scientific progress. It was, however, quite Aristotlean, but way too "ivory tower." It was Scholastic arguments that confronted Galileo. The moons of Jupiter were dismissed as "unnecessary" to God's perfect creation. That kind of thing. In matters of pure theology, Scholasticism is fine. But it's inadequate as a substitute for the scientific method.
However, from my tendency to shortcut I would like to observe that the "heart" of the matter was summed up in this statement from Keith Ward which betty boop quoted at post 910:
The contingency counter (multi-worlds, multi-verse, etc.) which is akin to the plenitude argument (anything that can happen has) fails on both points. On the one hand, it fails because even in multi-verse theories there is always a beginning and thus, no infinity of time. And it fails on the other, because the math which allows other universes would overarch the sum of them if they existed.
These two objections, BTW, form the reason I prefer Max Tegmark's radical Platonist Level IV multi-verse.
Oh yeah? Well you know what you can do with that thing! This is my universe, the one, the only; and I'm a patriot. As we universe loyalists say ...
The universe, love it or leave it!
The Universe: love it or love it!
If that's the case, then why would he protest creationism so forcefully? What does he care? He will soon cease to exist and at some point in the future the entire earth will dissolve into a firey ball of flame, wiping out all his efforts.
Has he not faced up to this dilema?
We all do what we gotta do.
I am curious, though. Is there some rule that truth has to correspond to our wishes?
I know a lot of people who, because of the evidence, accept the theory of evolution. But I don't know any of them who conclude that therefore their lives are pointless. I assume you think there's some kind of logical connection, but I don't see it at all. Why do you say that evolution must result in such a belief?
The argument that I've heard goes something like this:
If when I die I merely cease to exist, and the world as we know it is ultimately doomed. That is, at some point the galaxy we live in will either collape or come apart, then how does my life have any meaning? What would it matter if I died today or 30 years from now? At some point everything I have ever done will be destroyed, so what is the point?
I remember reading a bit about Carl Sagan, he stated his belief that he would cease to exist at death, yet he said his greatest sadness about dying was that he wouldn't get to continue his research. He was asked why his research mattered if humanity was ultimately doomed and he really couldn't provide a good answer.
I'm kind of curious. In your scenerio, earth is doomed also, and some on this thread say the end is imminant. So what is the point? According to your point of view, God knows our each and every ultimate end, so here we are struggling against the inevitable like fish in a barrel, fearful of a fate that is preordained. So what is the point?
I am playing Devil's advocate here, but my point is that your question cuts both ways. And you falsely assume that people run their lives on the basis of imaginary answers to juvenile questions.
So what? I don't see why that should cause anyone to dispair of living his life. The fact that it's brief makes it all the more valuable.
There is no inherent inconsistency between evolution and intelligent design. Anyone who says otherwise has an ideological chip on their shoulder.
No, the question I posed assumed that there was no God, in which case there was no pre-ordained fate. I make the assumuption that the scientist does not believe in God.
"They know where we are!"
You make assumptions that have no truth or merit. But the silliest assumption is that a finite life would be better off ended. No sane person thinks that way.
You are engaging in hyper-rationality, a caricature of rationality. In this mode, one might just as easily say the infinite life is meaningless, since any portion of it is an insignificant fraction of the whole. Even a billion years is zero when compared to infinity.
Relax. By the time this image reaches them we will be somewhere else.
So you think Prof. Mayr believes in God, and he believes that God created the universe as we know it?
Or, did you allow your knee-jerk reaction to get the better of you? Please try to re-read what I wrote. My simple point is that if Prof. Mayr believes that creationism is wrong, then I'd argue he believes that there is no God, and therefore, no meaning to his life.
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