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To: Liberal Classic
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,

592 posted on 05/06/2005 8:23:06 AM PDT by Diamond (Qui liberatio scelestus trucido inculpatus.)
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To: Diamond
Well, I'll say this: you won't get any argument from me if you advocate better science texts.
597 posted on 05/06/2005 10:02:27 AM PDT by Liberal Classic (No better friend, no worse enemy. Semper Fi.)
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