What good's evolving
Alone in your room?
Help populations change.
Life is a change in allele frequency over time old chum
...
Needs work.
Posted on 11/18/2005 4:34:43 AM PST by StatenIsland
Why intelligent design proponents are wrong.
Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous - that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious. Newton's religiosity was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and member of the Church of England. Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.
Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. "He believed he was doing God's work," wrote James Gleick in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation - understanding the workings of the universe - as an attempt to understand the mind of God.
Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the Earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked on upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical, and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.
Which brings us to Dover (Pa.), Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.
Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" - today's tarted-up version of creationism - on the biology curriculum. Robertson then called down the wrath of God upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.
Let's be clear. "Intelligent design" may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge - in this case, evolution - they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species, but that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science - that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution - or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?
In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase "natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying - by fiat of definition, no less - that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and to science.
The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernable direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by which the Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular interactions without "purpose"? Or are we to teach children that God is behind every hydrogen atom in electrolysis?
He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions - arguably, the most important questions in life - that lie beyond the material.
How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.
Originally published on November 18, 2005
Oh Man and I haven't collected my non-existent Social Security yet.
"But if you could see her through my eyes.....
She hardly looks Jewish at all!"
So "Cabaret" was inspired by Darwin.
What good's evolving
Alone in your room?
Help populations change.
Life is a change in allele frequency over time old chum
...
Needs work.
Greek warrior Spartan civilization. Weakling infants were left in the mountains to die.
The Republic, Book 5, Section 1. Plato recommended state-supervised selective breeding of children.
History of Australia. Before Darwin, England exiled criminals to purify the race.
It's all Darwin's fault.
My Great Great Grandpa was one of those sent to Australia. Quite a dapper dude.
My great grandfather had a brother who went to Australia. And stayed. No contact with that distant branch of the family. But he went there from the US, not from England on a prison ship. Still ... he was probably a horse thief. Who knows what lurks in the ol' family tree?
I can't prove old Harry was a thief, but the timing is very suspicious. And his arrival here in America corresponds with his "sentence" in Australia being up.
After serving their "sentences" in Australia, IIRC, they weren't alloed back into England, but they could leave Australia.
Well ... we know he didn't come here for the beer.
Maybe the beer in the mid 1800s was better.
You are both correct in a sense. English can be analyzed as having "subject" and "object" pronouns, "he" and "him" in this case. Another analysis is that English tends to have "before the verb" and "after the verb" pronouns rather than functional ones. The first analysis implies "he"; then second "him."
Other writers have suggested that "than" in the original sentence functions as a preposition giving the prepositional phrase "than him" rather than an elided clause wherein "than" is a conjuction.
Another example: "Who's that knocking at my door?" "It's I" vs "It's me." "Me" does the work of the French "moi" here.
Encouragement of reproduction of the "best" is usually termed "Positive Eugenics."
Sterilization of the "feeble" is usually termed "Negative Eugenics."
Positive Eugenics is generally considered to be more fun.
So should Gavrilo Princip be exonerated and Charles Darwin be blamed for WWI? Interesting topic for debate.
No, Darwin was not even in part responsible for WWI. However, the theory of evolution was important in giving scientific validity to the the idea of "survival of the fittest." People were quick to apply biology to society, because the biology seems to explain mankind.
The "best" seems to want to have fun, but not children; or if they do have children only a few"perfect" children.
"Quite beyond materialistic interactions, to me, the warp and woof of life suggests a maker with unfathomable grasp of the past, the future, the anvil of being, and the hammer of time and events, on human souls."
Nicely said, and yes, indeed, it does suggest that. But IMHO, the concept of a "maker" is not something that should be taught as science - the original point of the article. Great topic for a philosphy class, though.
I always wondered why there are so many Platonists among the creationists. I think Dr. Strangelove would approve.
He didn't do any such thing. People of all stripes are quick to misread science to support political ideas, but Darwin would not have accepted any such phrase.
Darwin did not, but Herbert Spencer and others did. A "theory" of evolution was proposed by Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus. Wallace come out with almost the same "theory" as Darwin. Darwin published twenty years of research to establish priority. The book was well-enough written to be [persuasive, and was pressed into service by the likes of Spencer and Huxley for many causes unrelated to his theory but related to a broader debate about the nature of man and his society. A new "natural law" was being promulgated and it began to look more and more like the law of the jungle, or to put it in biblical terms, the law of Cain. "Am I my brother's keeper?" But it did not begin with Darwin.
I'm not familiar with that name, and don't know a lot about WWI. My understanding, however, from various secondary sources, is that the Germans consciously pursued a policy of brutality early in the war, on the theory that it would make the war shorter. Apparently the military class seized on a superficial Darwinism as at least part of their rationalization of this policy.
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