Well, I'm sorry you're irked, but it's not like a man can't have an opinion.
And since natural history really is an unbroken continuum of events, why, other that practical reasons of scope of research, would one second prior to the beginning of macro-evolution be out of bounds of evolution and not one second after the beginning, other than merely by an argument from definition?
This is a non sequitur. Evolution as a practical scientific theory *must* be limited in scope of investigation. Just because some scientists express opinions on the subject does not mean the technical denotation is changed. Furthermore, just because these are opinions with which you may disagree does not mean you may redefine it, either. One of the reasons for maintaining rigorous hold on a technical definition is because it's so easy to redefine things. People are great definers and categorizers. Finding patterns is one of the things we're really good at, from dividing up history into eras to taxonomy to the periodic table. We're so good at it, some people will find patterns where there are none, like finding a potato that resembles Elvis or those spiritualists who listen to television static wanting to hear voices and so occasionally hear some random bit of white noise that sounds like "get out."
If science is to remain exclusively within the natural (material) realm methodologically (this itself is a metaphysical assumption) then in any putative naturalistic accounting of history the term ‘evolution’ cannot logically be excluded from the emergence of any thing that exists, including the beginning of life, or the universe itself because the universe began and has ‘evolved’ to what it is today.
This is sophistry. In one awkward sentence you've redefined 'evolution' to mean 'life, the universe, and everything' to which the answer is, of course, forty-two.
It seems to me that if such questions are entirely speculation, or conjecture because we really don't know what happened, then it is not science to assert that events happened of which we are ignorant.
You seem to be implying that scientists are asserting something as absolute fact on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, which of course isn't the case. In that long post with all the references in it (241 I think) there was at least one that contained the word 'speculation' in the title, and several named as hypotheses. Reading the titles (I haven't read the abstracts) it's clear people are trying to figure out what happened and how. Hypotheses by their very nature are speculative. Heaven forbid scientists speculate! Now, this is not to say that one hypothesis or another is without any supporting evidence. Hypotheses are designed to match what evidence we now have. What evidence might that be? Perhaps our understand of the early solar system, our understanding of molecular biology and inorganic chemistry? Certainly there is no one dominant theory of a naturalistic biogenesis as there is with the theory of evolution, but of course there are literally mountains of evidence for evolution.
See, you've managed to drag me kicking and screaming off topic. I don't often argue abiogenesis because, honestly, it's not a discipline I know a great deal about. This thread is about evolution, not origins. Please don't keep trying to change the subject.
As you alluded to in your post 459, there is a disconnect between the common usage of the term, evolution and the technical definition. In textbooks however, (and this is a thread about what is being taught in schools, btw) there are a least half-a-dozen usages of the term. It can mean anything from change over time, a historical narrative of the universe, to changes in the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool of a population, to limited common descent and the mechanisms for it, to universal common descent, or the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors through unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations.
The problem is equivocation. Some of these meanings generate no controversy at all. Nature has a history, gene frequencies change, limited common descent among organisms has occurred, and natural selection has played a significant role in speciation and species modification. The problem starts when evolutionists offer evidence and argument for evolution in these senses of the term and then speak of evolution in the macro-sense as if it were equally well established.
Your technical definition is of course permissible and proper, but I have given in this thread ample instances of varied and sometimes shifting meanings of the term used by scientists, teachers, and textbooks, etc, which are relevant to the subject of the article, which deals with aspects of the controversy. Abiogenesis is one of the subjects that is encompassed by the term as it is used in textbooks and elsewhere by scientists, whether it fits your preferred technical definition or not.
Cordially,