Posted on 08/14/2005 8:06:45 AM PDT by CarlEOlsoniii
Harvard University is launching a broad initiative to discover how life began, joining an ambitious scientific assault on age-old questions that are central to the debate over the theory of evolution.
The Harvard project, which is likely to start with about $1 million annually from the university, will bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets.
Known as the ''Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative," the project is still in its early stages, and fund-raising has not begun, the scientists said.
But the university has promised the researchers several years of seed money, and has asked the team to make much grander plans, including new faculty and a collection of multimillion-dollar facilities.
The initiative begins amid increasing controversy over the teaching of evolution, prompted by proponents of ''intelligent design," who argue that even the most modest cell is too complex, too finely tuned, to have come about without unseen intelligence.
President Bush recently said intelligent design should be discussed in schools, along with evolution. Like intelligent design, the Harvard project begins with awe at the nature of life, and with an admission that, almost 150 years after Charles Darwin outlined his theory of evolution in the Origin of Species, scientists cannot explain how the process began.
Now, encouraged by a confluence of scientific advances -- such as the discovery of water on Mars and an increased understanding of the chemistry of early Earth -- the Harvard scientists hope to help change that.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
I'm seriously considering switching sides and becoming a creationist myself. It's a lot of fun and much easier to just make stuff up as you go without doing any study or research and ignore everything that proves you wrong. There's a wealth of cut and paste websites that use big word logic to argue against science without you having to know anything about science yourself. Also, being a creationist means you can break into any old thread, insult intelligent people and challenge them to quote you a book they're too lazy to read themselves and if you're a sucker to fall for that, they just ignore it and hit you with another ignorant cut and paste.
Of course the downside is that if your religion tells you to believe in hell, you're surely going there for being so deliberately dishonest but that doesn't seem to bother any of the other creationists around here...
Just as I am not an "anti-evolutionist" - I have just taught you the faulty nature of the loaded question.
Festival-of-ignorance placemarker.
For someone who is not an anti-evolutionist, you sure do look, walk and quack like one. Pardon the mixed metaphor.
Evolution predicts absolutely nothing about the fossil record, for the simple reason that the fossil record is dependent on chance events for the preservation of events. I daresay that if you dig a hole in the forest you are unlikely to find many full skeletons, despite the fact that there should be at least 6000 years, by anyone's account, of accumulated animal parts.
What evolution actually predicts is that fossils, when found, will make sense as transitionals. This is in fact what has happened over the last 150 years.
Since you are not an anti-evolutionist, you already know this.
This assumes, however, that we've had a clear and consistent definition of the term species for over one hundered fifty years, which certainly isn't the case.
Biologists can't even agree now what definitively constitutes species.
How can evolution predict what will make sense as a transitional form, if it can't even postulate what makes sense as a species.
So observing the data makes one an "anti-evolutionist"
Interesting logic.
Biology doesn't have a clear definition of species because there is no clear fact of species. If you look at ring species you see what the term means, it is simply a human label applied to a population that does not usually interbreed with similar populations.
Ring species are a living laboratory demonstrating how populations transition into strong varieties with no absolute boundaries.
Why is a Theory treated as fact??>>>>>>>
For the sake of everybody's sanity please go to some school where they will teach you what a theory is and that something can involve fact as well as theory, they are not mutually exclusive. This constant display of ignorance does nothing to advance the cause of creationism.
Nonsense. The Big Bang Theory has predictions, cosmic background radiation being one, that can be observed, measured, and correlated with the predictions of the theory.
You seem to think that scientists are trying to invent some pre-ordained, politically acceptible history, rather than trying to discern what actually happened. It would be relatively useless for a scientist to protect some pre-conceived notion of the origin of the universe over that which evidence supports.
I picked this out of the article as well. If this is an accurate quotation of what those proposing this project have said, it is not science.
But, ten years from now ( when some of the funding seekers figure memories have gotten dim ), they will point to the experiments as validation of the premise.
And, if if this topic is considered as 'central to the debate over the theory of evolution' by scientists launching this project, then it puts the lie to the claim by evolution folks that evolution does not address the origins of life.
This is one of the few threads I probably will read, if only to shake my head at the gyrations gone through by the stone chuckers that are drawn like flies to crevo threads, despite that origins of life and origins of species ( as even claimed on this forum ) are supposedly separate issues.
"Darwin got his idea fro natural selection for the economics of the invisible hand. It convinced him that just as unplanned economies produce the best results, natural selection produces the most robust biological designs."
It appears that he actually got his idea from reading Malthus:
"The art of plant and animal breeding had existed for a long time. The step Darwin took was to postulate a similar process in nature. Presupposing that spontaneous variation somehow occurs, he postulated a process of selection, not by a human plant or animal breeder, but by nature. What could this process be? The answer occurred to him when he was reading Malthus on population. Wallace also got the idea from Malthus. (See Leakey (ed.), The Illustrated Origin of Species, pp. 9 and 10.) What Malthus said of the human population--that every pair produces more than two offspring and that there is a tendency to outstrip the food supply--occurs with every species. Just as the human population is checked and reduced from time to time by starvation, disease, war etc., so the population of every plant and animal species is checked from time to time by lack of food, predation, etc. Whatever the checks, only some individuals will survive and propagate; what matters in this context is not the parents' survival but propagation and the survival to the breeding stage of their offspring. Nature thus selects for breeding those individuals whose characteristics fit them best to survive and propagate in the face of whatever it is that is checking and reducing this population. If the check is a harsh climate, then nature selects those best fitted to survive and reproduce in a harsh climate. Notice that there is selection without any selector."
From here: http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/y64l051.html
Now, if I recall correctly, Malthus is a darling prophet to the environmental whacko leftists. Libertarian economists have neatly linked Darwinism to the Invisible Hand stuff, but it appears Darwin himself did not.
The irony detector must REALLY be on the fritz.
- Auguste Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive
- various works of the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet
- Dugald Stewart’s On the Life and Writing of Adam Smith
Bump
That makes absolutely no sense.
If/when Harvard's publications about this study begin to look a lot like the current crop of man made global warming conclusions, I hope FR's ToE supporters show proper outrage. Sadly, I won't hold my breath, as I believe it far more likely for the conclusions to be added to the reading lists used to challenge those of us on the other side of these discussions.
That new age quantum hocus-pocus fit's quite neatly into my beliefs. The more I read, the more I understand, the more I am in awe of God's creation.
That is quite some bite there you're taking. Sure it's not more than you can chew?
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