Posted on 01/30/2006 10:27:35 PM PST by Sweetjustusnow
Do you think the declaration of a new species is arbitrary?
Darwin was aware of the issue:
Those who do not admit the principle of evolution, must look at species as separate creations, or as in some manner as distinct entities; and they must decide what forms of man they will consider as species by the analogy of the method commonly pursued in ranking other organic beings as species. But it is a hopeless endeavour to decide this point, until some definition of the term "species" is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an indeterminate element such as an act of creation. We might as well attempt without any definition to decide whether a certain number of houses should be called a village, town, or city. We have a practical illustration of the difficulty in the never-ending doubts whether many closely-allied mammals, birds, insects, and plants, which represent each other respectively in North America and Europe, should be ranked as species or geographical races; and the like holds true of the productions of many islands situated at some little distance from the nearest continent.Source: Darwin, The descent of man, Chapter VII.
"village, town, or city."
Actually I believe most counties have definitions of village, town or city, don't they?
Indeed; a wise man, he was.
The Grand Master wants you to have the upcoming prime.
I know. I didn't say it was scientific, really. I understand if I gave that impression. But the poster I was responding to could leave the general impression that no scientists in any field considered a Higer Power relevant. Actually, the quotes and concepts about a Higer Power's role in all of this are quite abundant through the years. I can't recall the exact quote, but Einstein said something along the lines of, "If you seek God, look deeply in to nature," and Hawking has written something along the same lines.
There are many of us who feel evolution is a real force and was also put in to force. Astrophysic's relevance is drawn in when trying to ask sincere questions of, let's say , a highly trained naturalist, about the TOeverything's, tie to biology-or stating, "hey what about the concept of 'conciousness,' or isn't quantum mechanics really narly and leaves all these new questions unanswered" and one then gets talked down to by said naturalist.
Yes, we know the scientific method can't be employed for most of what I'm talking about. But man, are there really people that go around every waking hour feeling the scientific method is some kind of sacrament? That's just kind of wierd. It's just a man-made constuct. The scientific method is not a force of nature, no matter how incredibly valuable it has been to mankind. It's almost like some folks here have a poster of C. Darwin on the ceiling, a jar of vasaline on the nightstand and then get up to go to work with a fake Darwin beard on and "Beagle" painted on the back of the car.
Victor Frankel was pretty persuasive in writing on man's inherent thirst for meaning. Don't you think that every "thinking" human is going to at least have some intellectual "wrestling match" over the concept(s) at some point in his/her life all on their own? To think that a biology teacher couldn't lawfully start out the semester with "we are going to teach and study the theory of evolution this semester, a convergence of science from much convincing evidence, experimentation and review. There is debate over how the mechanism came about and was put in to play, but that is a question for outside this class...It will be studied in philosophy or religion class...." is really questionable teaching given we ALL think about this stuff and always have. To just make an innocuous statement about what everyone thinks about anyway and possibly be punished for it is becoming almost Orwellian in nature.
I guess I'm just saying that this pejoritive term of "scientism" is getting richly earned by even the evolutionary biologist IMO; to get made fun of because one seeks some answers outside the scope of natural selection about a possible meaning for life, or dismissing someone who is fairly learned but inducts the possiblity we don't really know jack about how all of this started is not the best way to convert the unwashed masses some high-minded posters on the threads seem to want to help. If they are engaged in something else, it smacks of sport and elitism for personal emotional reasons.
However, something like this is to be expected and not really that remarkable at all but it seems to cause extreme headache to those who think that there must be a clear-cut answer to everything.
Both use math, eh? Both use logic, experimental technique, rationality, eh? Oh, I'm sorry, you're right. Astrophysics is not biology.
Somewhat off-topic, but it was interesting to read up on how Lewontin and Gould wanted to eat their own when Wilson started introducing sociobiology to the picture and survival of the fittest...Didn't quite square with the Harvard egalitarianist mind-set, ya know. I don't know if you are aware of how highly Lewontin thought of himself and his community, but it is really a little unsettling.
Yeah, it seems the man was a real know-it-all ;^)
Heck, sometimes I have the impression that most creationist claims can be refuted with Darwin's writings alone without the need to reference more recent papers.
Guess he saw it all coming...
I wonder how so many creationists actually practice medicine, have PHd.'s in all scientific fields? In your pea-brain, you think one can only understand science if they swear allegience to evolution? Again, why don't you go to your list and post a few of these accusations? Perhaps rather than do document dumps, you can actually hold an in-depth discussion of one issue at a time?
Exactly; some people can't seem to grasp the concept that whenever you "quantize a continuum" with an arbitrarily chosen boundary, there will always be objects in the same neighborhood of the continuum but on opposite sides of the boundary, one in one category, the other in a different one, yet they will be almost indistinguishable from one another. It doesn't matter where the boundary is drawn (unless it happens to fall in a region that is not occupied by elements of the continuum, in which case it arguably isn't a continuum!) -- as long as the boundary divides a neighborhood, you'll be able to find two elements of the neighborhood on opposite sides of the boundary.
The Inuits of Northern Canada live life in ways starkly different than Americans in the lower 48 -- they live on blubber and travel around in kayaks and dog sleds; but do Canadians in Windsor, ONT live life much differently than Americans across the river in Detroit, MI? If you put them in a police line up, you probably couldn't tell the Windsor resident from a person from Detroit, while the Inuit would stand out like a dead seal pup with a baseball bat embedded in its skull.
The point is, this same similarity of elements in the same neighborhood bisected by a boundary would occur, NO MATTER WHERE YOU CHOSE TO PUT THE US/CANADIAN BOUNDARY!
As you correctly note, the phenomona is to be expected, and doesn't signify much of anything significant, as it is simply an artifact of the quantizing process.
I seek post numbers having Transcendental value only... please alert me when a post number equalling Napier's Constant is available....
Until then, I remain the Grand Master's....
....Most Humble & Obedient Servant
As Plaintiffs meticulously and effectively presented to the Court, Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court's decision in Edwards [Edwards v. Aguillard], which held that the Constitution forbids teaching creationism as science. By comparing the pre and post Edwards drafts of Pandas, three astonishing points emerge: (1) the definition for creation science in early drafts is identical to the definition of ID; (2) cognates of the word creation (creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately 150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID; and (3) the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in public school science classes in Edwards. This word substitution is telling, significant, and reveals that a purposeful change of words was effected without any corresponding change in content, which directly refutes FTE's [FTE = the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, the publisher of Pandas] argument that by merely disregarding the words "creation" and "creationism," FTE expressly rejected creationism in Pandas. In early pre-Edwards drafts of Pandas, the term "creation" was defined as "various forms of life that began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features intact – fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc," the very same way in which ID is defined in the subsequent published versions.Source: Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al..
YEC SPOTREP
Another hilarious emission from FesterWorld.
AKA, festeractivity.
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