Posted on 07/04/2004 5:19:27 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
Professor Ernst Mayr, the scientist renowned as the father of modern biology, will celebrate his 100th birthday tomorrow by leading a scathing attack on creationism.
The evolutionary biologist, who is already acclaimed as one of the most prolific researchers of all time, has no intention of retiring and is shortly to publish new research that dismantles the fashionable creationist doctrine of “intelligent design”.
Although he has reluctantly cut his workload since a serious bout of pneumonia 18 months ago, Prof. Mayr has remained an active scientist at Harvard University throughout his 90s. He has written five books since his 90th birthday and is researching five academic papers. One of these, scheduled to appear later this year, will examine how “intelligent design” — the latest way in which creationists have sought to present a divine origin of the world — was thoroughly refuted by Charles Darwin a century and a half ago.
His work is motivated in part by a sense of exasperation at the re-emergence of creationism in the USA, which he compares unfavourably with the widespread acceptance of evolution that he encountered while growing up in early 20th-century Germany.
The states of Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Oklahoma currently omit the word “evolution” from their curriculums. The Alabama state board of education has voted to include disclaimers in textbooks describing evolution as a theory. In Georgia, the word “evolution” was banned from the science curriculum after the state’s schools superintendent described it as a “controversial buzzword”.
Fierce protest, including criticism from Jimmy Carter, the former President, reversed this.
Prof. Mayr, who will celebrate his 100th birthday at his holiday home in New Hampshire with his two daughters, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, was born on 5 July 1905 in Kempten, Germany. He took a PhD in zoology at the University of Berlin, before travelling to New Guinea in 1928 to study its diverse bird life. On his return in 1930 he emigrated to the USA. His most famous work, Systematics and the Origin of Species, was published in 1942 and is regarded still as a canonical work of biology.
It effectively founded the modern discipline by combining Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s genetics, showing how the two were compatible. Prof. Mayr redefined what scientists mean by a species, using interbreeding as a guide. If two varieties of duck or vole do not interbreed, they cannot be the same species.
Prof. Mayr has won all three of the awards sometimes termed the “triple crown” of biology — the Balzan Prize, the Crafoord Prize and the International Prize for Biology. Although he formally retired in 1975, he has been active as an Emeritus Professor ever since and has recently written extensively on the philosophy of biology.
That's a biased, but reasonable statement. The question is, what is signified by our inability to recreate something. Does it mean it is impossible? Or does it mean we don't know everything?
A hundred years ago we could neither understand nor create nuclear fusion. So what did that mean?
ROTFLMAO!
Extrapoaltion is pretty much a matter of applying mathematics and algorithms. What happens in induction is not really understood. The phrase "jumping to conclusions" comes to mind. Calling it a creative process seems circular.
Are those wildly elliptical ellipses? hehe
Yes, which is why I used "extrapolation" in quote marks.
Whatever it is, it is the step of going from the data of a finite number of cases to proposing some sort of general priciple that applies in all cases.
Never mind the man behind the curtain. It's just RA making inane posts again. :-)
Yes. I wrote to hastily. What I had in mind, but didn't say, is that the hypothesis needs to make some predictions, which are then verified as indeed being so. Which means that the hypothesis has verifiably survived a falsification test. I trust that Popper will now cease spinning.
Trolling for suckers tonight?
i already mentioned moles. this has chemical applications, and so, it does. thanks though :)
i do think i found why its so hard for your people to go with what i am saying. i am using a real world application, that is, science and philosophy. you are only working in science. this is my bad for not recognizing the blend when showing math.
I'm not going to bother with checking if i used the word "circumstance" or not. if i did, i shouldn't have. its not under a specific way of looking at it if they are equal, its more a matter of whats "good enough" for a specific application.
cutting an apple into thirds by hand is not exact, but it can be "good enough" to be fair. i am also not stating i support one thing over the other, i am showing that things aren't always what we claim. it is an unbiased observation, not an opinion.
Kerry swings his opinion like a hammer (a single war, which has not changed circumstance, he has gone back and forth supporting) i am steadfast that math is subjective depending on the application involved. (an idea of numbers is different, depending on the usage)
its like the joke about the man in the woods who has a philosopher, an engineer, and a physicist walk in and see his wood-burning stove is 3 feet above the ground.
the scientist looks at it and says "ah, this man knows heat radiates, so he wants to spread the heat as far as he can by raising it."
the philosopher says "no, he obviously wanted the heat and light to provide him with a new view of life, so he raised it to look at things in a new way."
and the engineer said "no, no, no, you both got it wrong, he raised it because it gets real cold here at night, he sleeps under it to keep warm at night"
the man speaks up at this point, and points out "actually, i just ran out of pipe."
ah, you qualified it though. "real line"
please, what is the exact value of the square root of -1? you cant come up with a simple single value.
square root(-1) = i
Not one what?
this is a mathematical principle. .999... approaches 1, but is so close, it is often used as 1.
What's 1.0000... - 0.9999...? It's 0.0000..., right?
Oh, get real.
yes, "i" is the square root of -1. now, whats its value? "value" is an amount or numeric quantity, a representation of an amount is just that, a representation.
why yes it is. where does the 0 end though? each 0 must account for every two 9's.
No it doesn't, nor does it sound like anything resembling what paleontologists actually do to establish phylogenies. Troll.
(So far, we have a 1-to-1 correspondence between posting in colored fonts and being disingenuous.)
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