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.
What are you referring to? DNA? RNA? Starch on paper? Silver in an emulsion?
Yes, but you are defining a very narrow definition of "living". You might keep an intestinal parasite alive for a while without a live host, but it would not reproduce. The species would die out in one generation. There are other constraints on reproduction. Passenger pigeons died out when their numbers declined. For some reason that species required a critical minimum number of individuals in order to survive. Something to think about when you are tempted to wonder how evolution can select for group benefit rather than individual benefit.
Parasitism exists. Parasites cannot survive and reproduce without hosts. My original question is, how is this conceptually different from the need of a virus or prion for a host in order to reproduce? It is true that prions and viruses do not metabolize, but they take over the metabolism of their host and bend it to their own reproduction. And they evolve.
I think any definition of life should address this behavior.
If you continue your education you will not be able to change a tire.
That does seem to be the argument that's been offered!
No. I also posted his statement which is quite important.
It is gibberish in that what is meant by "molecules" or which molecules he means were no understandable neither was what he means by "arrangement".
Here's the statement:
...in discussions about DNA, he's talking about the arrangement of the molecules, which determines their function
What are the molecules being arranged? What is the function determined by that arrangement.
Answer these incredibly straightforward, basic, non-trick questions and you will see why it wasn't right.
I pick:
"What you said is completely incomprehensible."
I said it was gibberish, which is not always completely incomprehensible, but lets set that aside for the moment.
I do know what you are trying, and fail utterly, to say. Yet you are more mistaken than correct in your point.
You seem to be using the word gibberish without understanding its meaning. If you can understand it, it ain't gibberish.
Your wrote "Finally, the "argument from ignorance" doesn't mean someone's making an ignorant argument -- it means that they are invoking the logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance. Schützenberger employs this again and again, generally in the form, "I can't conceive that evolution could produce such complexity, thus it clearly couldn't have"."
I find this rather amusing. Creationists could say the same thing about atheistic evolutionists stand against creationist paradigms. However, be that as it may, I have studied formal logic and I don't agree with you when you say he has committed a logical fallacy. In my opinion, this doesn't apply to what he said. His points are valid.
I wrote - "Probability and mathematics are much easier to test via the scientific method than evolution."
You wrote - "Whenever a biological issue is understood well enough to allow a valid mathematical or probabilistic analysis, evolution has passed it with flying colors."
The allgorithms these folks have used to demonstrate evolution are flawed - they let too many assumptions of evolutionary theory stand. If you weight your equations to favor something - assuming it true - you have biased the result. However, I readily admit that I would have to differ to someone more knowledgable about computer allogoritms like AG to answer this.
Excuse me? The Nazis are dead and gone (except for a few nutcases chasing blues singers in Illinois). The Jews have their own country and are flourishing throughout the world, including in areas where they are not quite welcome (Europe, the Middle East).
Some Jews died, but the group survived.
Very Christian of you to look forward to the pain and suffering of those who disagree with you.
Ah, questions...
That seems to be a theme on these threads, but I receive solace from knowing that, even among true believers, there is probably a sliver of doubt in the back of their minds, an occasional lapse into heresy, or an unnoticed false opinion that will, on the day of judgment, cause them to be cast into outer darkness forever. According to prophets, only a handful will pass the final test, and those will no doubt be the ones without the intellect to engage in curiosity.
How is a parasite's requirement for food different from other organisms?
How astute of you. Now questions beg answers, do you have any to clear up exactly what you meant?
Because the species will not survive without the host. There is a sense in which nearly all species are parasitic, but some more obviously than others.
I am really trying to bridge the conceptual gap between cellular life and such entities as viruses and prions.
Ok. We have established you also recognize it as gibberish.
OK, next: "I don't know what you mean by most of the words you use so there are ambiguities."
Borders are fuzzy but hell is murky.
Spencer "cheerfully acknowledged" that the hypothesis of evolution had "serious difficulties." But, he said, "save for those who still adhere to the Hebrew myth, or to the doctrine of special creations derived from it, there is no alternative but this hypothesis or no hypothesis." Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 1896, 1:466.The truly funny thing is that the philosophical naturalists of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries were so successful in conflating the doctrines of naturalism and evolution together with biological empiricism that many people today think, erroneously, that the essence of science, any field of science, is materialist monism ("The Cosmos is all there is, was, or ever shall be." paraphrase of Carl Sagan). And they could probably even read the following without batting an eye over its sheer intellectual stupidity:
"I by no means suppose that the transmutation hypothesis is proven or anything like it. But...I would very strongly urge upon you [Lyell] that it is the logical development of Uniformitarianism, and that its adoption would harmonize the spirit of Paleontology with that of Physical Geology." Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 1903, 3 volumes, 1:252.
"The possibility, ever so distant, of banishing from nature its seeming purpose, and putting blind necessity everywhere in the place of final causes, appears, therefore, as one of the greatest advances in the world of thought." Emil du Bois-Reymond, 1904, cited in J.T. Merz's A history of European thought in the ninetheenth century. 4 volumes, Dover Pub., 1:435.
Darwin's theory "turns the Creator--and his occasional intervention in the revolutions of the earth and in the production of species--without any hesitation of of doors, inasmuch as it does not leave the smallest room for the agency of such a Being." (emphasis added)--Karl Vogt.
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