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.
Wow. You really have absolutely no arguments of any substance or intelligence whatsoever, do you?
You know, you're right. I was being lazy. You guys presented your cases much better than I. I was just trying to be combative, and not very good at that. Regards, O.C.
In sum, one cannot reasonably discuss the "origin of life" without first being able to describe the physical difference between that which is alive and that which is not.
But Patrick, I don't have to allege that the information is a "message" coming from "somewhere" when -- so to speak -- the "medium is the message."
I will repeat again: I don't have to put God on the stage here in order for the natural world to explain itself. If we would but listen.
Why is this point so elusive, so difficult for you?
True, but only creationists do so.
Or mostly dead. What about the spore form of bacteria?
Then Pearcy and Thaxton are simply wrong. I don't know who either of them are, but in making such a nonsense statement, they exhibit a lack of knowledge of modern (post 1900) mathematics and physics. You would be better served by examining what ia actually going on in these fields rather than relying on whoever these two are.
You mention Wolfram's book which in fact refutes P&T completely. Wolfarm gives simple rules which generate complicated, unpredictable patterns. There is much more available in scientific journals (qv).
A spore is not dead, it is vegetative or dormant form which still has information and can communicate, e.g. once it has a food source.
Thanks for your post!
Evolution is a reality. It takes nothing away from's God's divinity or role as creator everything. If God wants to use evolution to change things, who are we to say otherwise? Babies evolve from single-celled animals. Don't they?
As for the origin othe universe, it happened about 5:00 a.m. this morning, when I woke up.
Congratulations, you are the only one of your crowd to use your noggin. There are bacterial spores and cysts. Some bacterial spores were said to be revived after 250 million years. That result is suspect. Studies have been done as to the sturdiness of the spores with the aim to investigate them as the source of cosmic life(panspermia). It was found that they need some protection from UV radiation.
I haven't found this definition used by Shannon anywhere. I did find a reference from Berlinski making the claim. If Berlinski's horrible book on algorithms is an example of his work, his re-definition of information isn't very accurate or useful.
According to Shannon and Weaver information is defined as “a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message”. In information theory, information and uncertainty are closely related. Information refers to the degree of uncertainty present in a situation.
It's better to go to Shannon (or Shannon and Weaver, an easily accessible booklet) to find out what is actually meant rather than rely on a (seeming unreliable) third party. Shannons papers are available online.
It's been a while since I read through Shannon's papers, but I will do it again (though probably not tonight).
As I recall, his work in the 1940's was oriented to communications, the mathematics of communications. That was the "state of the art". The term "information" was coined for success and "entropy" for failure. The second term (as I recall) was coined with his permission and has led to much confusion because of its usage in other contexts.
Definitions of life become arbitrary as the molecular size diminishes. But an evilutionist would probably that the essential qualities of a living unit are replication and susceptibility to variation and selection. It is not unreasonable to include prions, because -- as our ID proponent in chief has pointed out -- proteins do not occur in the absence of living processes.
How would you classify an obviously living thing that cannot reproduce without the presence of specific other living things? Is a parasite dead if there are no hosts? If not, is a virus alive in the absense of a host? Is a prion?
So being presented with one cell which is dead and one which is alive, how would you describe the difference?
No, "entropy" was used because the formula for information was the negative of the formula derived by Boltzmann for thermodynamic entropy. Someone (I think Hamming told me that it was von Neumann) suggested jokingly that Shannon should call information "entropy" because no one would understand what he meant.
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