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 meant to bump #640 to you, AndrewC. Sorry about that itchy trigger finger of mine....
If life is just a deterministic result of the laws of chemistry, it should be quite easy to make a puree of the bacteria of your choice which should by the deterministic laws of chemistry reassemble into bacteria once again.
I read your mind.
Your posts are really good. You are obviously very well read. I salute you.
As strange as this may sound to folks who haven't bothered to study or reflect on this, I couldn't agree with you more, A-G. But if folks do think about this, then they have to figure out what it means.
Maybe this sort of thing is just too taxing an exercise for folks who are perfectly fine human beings despite their lack of interest in the subject. I guess this is why we have scientists and philosophers (not to menton theologians) -- who specialize in critical questions that no one else has the time to care about, or at least about which they have no interest, even as reasonably well-informed generalists. Still, even "folks" have to pay attention to what's going on both in politics and in science these days -- if only for reasons of self-defense. :^)
Or so it seems to me.
Thank you A-G.
Why sure, go start the experiment! Report back to us when you are finished.
Take one planet full of sludge where water is a liquid, inject sunlight for 400 million years and see what you get.
Oh, wait, we need controls, so make that 100 billion galaxies full of 100 billion 2nd-generation stars each, each with a preponderonce of planets with a reasonable pecentage in the same temperate zone as the Earth. See you in 400 million years.
Enjoy...
;-/
Go read a Bible without moving your lips.
;-)
I don't need all of that. I already have a living organism. Everything needed is there. All we do is confuse the structure a bit. Deterministic chemistry should correct everything if that is all we need.
I suspect that you are putting much more meaning into the word "information." If you define it so as to mean that DNA contains some kind of message from somewhere, then you have pre-determined (so to speak) your conclusion that something more than chemistry must be going on. But that conclusion is inherent in the way you define "information," and I really think your definition needs some work.
But nobody except trolls like you have suggested that that was all we need. Gee, this time think about your words before you hit "post".
Hey, look! I've weaned myself from using the word "dumbass"!
Well here's your chance to name what you have not named.
Oops. Sometimes our fallible humanity just shines through.
And you evidently didn't read post #651 Mr "foul mouth". You cannot have a civil discourse can you?
Cool it.
I suspect that you are putting much more meaning into the word "information." If you define it so as to mean that DNA contains some kind of message from somewhere, then you have pre-determined (so to speak) your conclusion that something more than chemistry must be going on. But that conclusion is inherent in the way you define "information," and I really think your definition needs some work.
The information is not the DNA - the DNA is the symbolism, the coding, the complexity, the processor. Just like a computer does nothing until it is turned "on" - the DNA is not alive in itself. Life is in the information, the communication. The definition of information is "successful communication" (Shannon).
Once the cell quits communicating, it is dead.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.