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.
For theology, what set of facts are you talking about? And can you give an example of something happening in theology like the way that people who initially blew off plate tectonics being convinced of it later?
Any idea how may kids with Computer Science degrees and a few years of graduate work (read: no real world experience) have never heard of EF Codd?
Get 10 years of real world experience before suggesting you are some sort of "expert in the field."
Smart children keep their ears and eyes open and their mouths shut.
Agreed.
This thread has nothing to do with the flat earth issue.
(sigh) A long, needless post that answers nothing except to point out one's own bigotry against the tests of another point of view.
You are implying a host of people much more educated and intelligent than you are "scientific illiterates". (see post 34)
I do not accept this reasoning. Such reasoning is specious.
You must be one of those poor people who can't afford a sense of humor.
Crackpots come in all sizes.
I wrote -"However, you must know that secularists do."
"I don't."
Fair enough, but do you think abiogenesis took place? If not, then how could you be a "secularist" (AKA atheist)?
Back in the 70s I had a Zoology professer that placed great emphasis on the separation of "evolution" from "abiogensis." However, he taught them both as undeniably fact and together - while maintaining their separdness. Intellectual dishonesty.
Also, what is your opinion of a theistic evolutionist?
I wonder whether any of those people who are alleged to be "much more educated and intelligent than you are" have ever produced even one scientific achievement which is based on their "creation science." I suspect not. Genuine biologists have fathered the whole biotech industry, with products in medicine, agriculture, etc. Where are the products that have come from "creation science"? It's a strange "science" indeed that does nothing, explains nothing, conducts no research, predicts nothing, yet demands a place at the table.
"I am definitely a secularist but do not couple evolutionary theory with abiogenesis. That makes you wrong.
Furthermore, most do not - just poll the "secularists" posting to this thread and you will see. That makes you wronger."
What we have here a failure to communicate - my error. What I should have said is an "atheistic evolutionist" rather than "secularist." Apparently, there is a semantic difference that I did not realize.
As "I" see things, there are three basic groups of thought regarding evolution and abiogenesis:
(1) Atheistic Evolutionist - no God, no devine intervention, it just happened - an inate property of matter. Many different viewpoints on mechanisms, but all hold to no creator.
(2) Theistic Evoluntionist - Adds a "designer" in some way to the equation. Many different shades of these folks.
(3) Creationists. God did it all. Most, not all, hold to a literal belief in the Bible and the Genesis account - with differing "spins" of course.
Apparantly, a "secularist" could be in both group (1) and (2). So, I used the wrong term.
"Is it also 'dishonesty' to teach electromagnetism theory and stellar formation as fact while maintaining their seperatness?"
You are resorting to hyperbole. That is fallacious reasoning.
The goal is to prove evolution, and every new discovery is use to further that goal, many alterations have been made since Darwin to give evolution credibility.
Really? Then this recent article (for one example) should not have been published: Epigenetics: Genome, Meet Your Environment. It reviews how mainstream scientists are realizing that there are some the ways in which characteristics can be passed on in a non-hereditary manner. It may not exactly be the resurrection of Lamarckism as a general explanation for evolution, but in some isolated cases it may turn out to be exactly that: Lamarckism!
If mainstream science is a conspiracy to validate Darwin's theory by any self-serving means necessary, then those scientists that the article mentions should have gotten themselves disappeared by now.
Just look how this article is written and directed, nothing in it to give themselves credibility, rather a mocking of "Creationist" going to get theirs. That is the foundation of evolution's "scientific methods".Oh, c'mon, It's a retrospective article on the guy's 100th birthday! And now he's going to write yet another book, this time to enter the fray against the fabian creationists. If an old, respected astronomer were to write a book against astrology, would you think he was making a mockery of the scientific method too? If an old, respected historian were to write a book against holocaust revisionism or afrocentrist history, would you think they were making a mockery of the scientific method?
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