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.
It was someone named "Bob J" promoting a link to his thread with multiple posts. Someone must have complained.
"If under the right conditions "life" will "happen"(abiogenesis) then where is the need for a creator?"
If God created life THROUGH abiogenesis, that would make your arguments moot. Indeed, the God I believe in can create life anyway he pleases, yours can only do it through some magic trick, which creationist methodology you REQUIRE to be anti-logical (else a logical mechanism like evolution would be possible).
But no matter whether life was created through abiogenesis, creation, or random bits of chewing gum, the same moral questions and quest for purpose and a connection with God remain.
well, you offered an opinion, and Doc Stoc did as well. guess what? they conflict. go ahead, argue with him on whether the Nazis cited tha Bible and Darwinism. he says so, i say so, you say no. you have opinion, i have the fact that that is what they taught in their schools.
also, i did not say evolution supported it, i said genocide did. genocided uses evolution, much like propaganda. i never said it was the correct useage, only that it was used.
and pack animals killing off others IS insensitive. what the hell do you think genocide is? humane? again, evolution is merely used by Nazis. another example is the Green Party and Communism. Green Party being the "evolution" aspect.
as for the NAzis saying that the less fit would not survive: the Nazis felt it was their DUTY to make it happen. "thin the heard" so to speak. this was to "ensure pure blood" and the survival and thriving of the Aryan race. it is the SAME mindset that causes pack animals to eat the young of an opposing male.
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).
if i recall correctly, their is a STRONG Nazi Party in Brazil...... i could be mistaken.
their is
*there is
duh
You recall incorrectly. It's important to know the difference between group velocity and phase velocity. Neither energy nor information was transmitted faster than light.
Absloute zero is a temperature; it's just a valid as 98.6F; only it's harder to reach. There are nevative temperatures too (think laser); they are just hotter than positive ones.
Temperature is a measurment of the energy released in a given field. you stop movement, you stop energy release. you stop energy release, you achieve absolute 0. the "negative temp" you refer to is actually just a reversal of direction. the "hotter" aspect isnt true either, it just releases more energy.
if you want "negatives" to apply, wrap your brain around anti-matter. the equivelant of a proton has a "negative positive" charge, the electron has an "negative negative charge"
those seem simple enough to explain as simple inversions, but then the neutron equivelant has a "negative neutral" charge.
also, as a long overdue response to a post: you cant test God, so you say He isnt real. show me a "test" for life. given you can't "prove" mountains are or are not alive, i will assume you can't work that one either. given your line of thinking, "life" is as acceptable as God in theory.
how about we say this.
I , as i have stated in relation to this post, accept both a theory that exaplins how we became humans AND we came to be "living"
and you simply accept evolution, and reject the notion that an outside source created life.
same for you dimensio.
it is obvious we all have knowledge of the field, just differing philosophies to exaplin them.
Also please accept my apologies for being so late to reply. This was our nineth anniversary and we have just now started winding down. LOL!
I have many others which I've been researching these past few years. Here is the latest version of an article I've written containing my musings and links to all the various source articles: Evolution through the back door.
I've continued researching since my last update and hopefully will have more to add to it in the next week or so.
js1138 also asked me about viruses. My opinion is that viruses are alive under the definition of life as information (Shannon, paraphrased as "successful communication").
My understanding is that a virus works by incorporating its DNA into the host DNA. If the virus successfully communicates with itself and its environment then it passes the information benchmark and would be considered "alive".
No. Temperature is not an energy anymore than a kilogram weighs an hour. Your mistakes in posting elementary thermodynamics do not increase your credibility in other areas. VI = ON
Why wouldn't they be able to reproduce?
And anyway I say that you don't have to be able to reproduce to be classified as living. Mules are alive. You do agree with that, right?
For some reason [Passenger pigeons] required a critical minimum number of individuals in order to survive.
Are saying that Passenger pigeons weren't alive because they went extinct?
My original question is, how is [Parasitism] conceptually different from the need of a virus or prion for a host in order to reproduce?
I didn't say viruses and prions aren't parasites, just that they're not alive.
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.
I think it is more interesting to think of them as epiphenomena of DNA-based life.
And they evolve.
Yes but that is a characteristic of populations. It is the individuals that are alive - or not in the case of prions and viruses. As with reproductive capacity, "evolvability" is neither sufficient nor necessary to be classified as living. If some kind of cell were engineered to reproduce without any error whatsoever, we would still classify it as living.
This might be a bit clearer by referring back to the links provided by Doctor Stochastic at post 674 and by me at post 684. From that post, here is the definition of information:
--- Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Part III, section 20, number 3
If someone says that information = uncertainty = entropy, then they are confused, or something was not stated that should have been. Those equalities lead to a contradiction, since entropy of a system increases as the system becomes more disordered. So information corresponds to disorder according to this confusion.
If you always take information to be a decrease in uncertainty at the receiver and you will get straightened out:
R = Hbefore - Hafter.
where H is the Shannon uncertainty:
H = - sum (from i = 1 to number of symbols) Pi log2 Pi (bits per symbol)
and Pi is the probability of the ith symbol. If you don't understand this, please refer to "Is There a Quick Introduction to Information Theory Somewhere?".
Imagine that we are in communication and that we have agreed on an alphabet. Before I send you a bunch of characters, you are uncertain (Hbefore) as to what I'm about to send. After you receive a character, your uncertainty goes down (to Hafter). Hafter is never zero because of noise in the communication system. Your decrease in uncertainty is the information (R) that you gain.
Since Hbefore and Hafter are state functions, this makes R a function of state. It allows you to lose information (it's called forgetting). You can put information into a computer and then remove it in a cycle.
Many of the statements in the early literature assumed a noiseless channel, so the uncertainty after receipt is zero (Hafter=0). This leads to the SPECIAL CASE where R = Hbefore. But Hbefore is NOT "the uncertainty", it is the uncertainty of the receiver BEFORE RECEIVING THE MESSAGE.
[snip]
And on your other reply, you asked:
The life cycle of Bacillus anthracis has four major phases: vegetative phase (from spores to replicating bacteria), intense growth phase, stationary phase, and sporulation phase. Anthrax spores have a relatively high level of resistance to high temperatures and disinfectants.
Bacillus anthracis forms a poly-D-glutamic acid capsule while in the host animal, when grown with nutrient media containing blood or blood plasma, and in the presence of CO2. Bacillus anthracis does not sporulate in so-called "capsule-forming" media as efficiently as when it is cultivated in vivo. According to current knowledge, the capsule is neither immunogenic nor toxigenic, but is considered as a virulence factor as it protects anthrax vegetative cells from the bactericidal components of serum and phagocytosis. The capsule plays its most important role during the establishment of infection and is believed to be less significant in later stages of the disease, which are mediated by the anthrax toxin.
Earthly perspectives are not valid in the hereafter, and there will be no view of Hell from Heaven. There is nothing a true Christian will not do or say to encourage a fellow sinner to take another look at their single biggest mistake... having turned their back on the one path back to salvation, Jesus Christ.
It's notable that you take the time to criticize my harsh tactics while you give a free pass to those who blaspheme against God.
Those whose names are not written in the Book of Life (you...?) will burn for eternity in Hell with Satan's demons. The pain of that experience, though great, will not compare to the pain of being forever separated from God the Father.
I wish better than that for you, but I can only use any means at my disposal to exhort you. The choice is yours. Let no man say he has not heard.
Earthly perspectives are not valid in the hereafter, and there will be no view of Hell from Heaven. There is nothing a true Christian will not do or say to encourage a fellow sinner to take another look at their single biggest mistake... having turned their back on the one path back to salvation, Jesus Christ.
It's notable that you take the time to criticize my harsh tactics while you give a free pass to those who blaspheme against God.
Those whose names are not written in the Book of Life (you...?) will burn for eternity in Hell with Satan's demons. The pain of that experience, though great, will not compare to the pain of being forever separated from God the Father.
I wish better than that for you, but I can only use any means at my disposal to exhort you. The choice is yours. Let no man say he has not heard.
I should also note that there is nothing that a minion of Satan won't do or say to lead another further away from the one true Path to Salvation... Jesus Christ.
Go ahead and prove my point some more.
;-/
Diabolical placemarker.
I thought it amusing, although one link would have done it.
Odd; I see plenty of Jews, and only a few pathetic remnants of the Nazis.
I thought his point was abundantly clear: "them thar EVILutionists are like NAZIS!"
Of course, it's easier to follow the "argument" if you've slummed at DU long enough to recognize this variation of their standard swipe at Republicans and conservatives.
In 1952, Josef Stalin had ruled longer than any American president, over a larger area than the United States, and had killed more of his enemies than any American. Ergo, by your theory of politics, communism is superior to constitutional republicanism.
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