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.
ooga booga, me Mac.
my sn is in scotch Gaelic, i can greet, thank and ask you simple questions in korean, japanese, cantonese, vietnamese, french, german, and spanish... i have a grasp of the norse language regarding runespeak (dead language) but im a moron who doesnt understand that language is a means of communication that can have its rules bent and still make sense.....
Lan dhen cac
"Turtle droppings -- sandy beach -- retro-evo-flagellatorium ... Masticating Mastadons, DEATH!"
< /fdot memorial lunacy mode>
if you thought my goal was to impress people, instead of conveying ideas, dont you think i would be a little mroe conformist to the rules? im not trying to make you go "oh, look at him, hes original"
i genuinely dont care about that. you either get me or you dont. you dont have to mock me on the sides though, that isnt discussion.
ah screw it, you all "win" if that gets you randy.
you refuse to listen (and claim i make no sense, yet pick apart my statements, meaning you have a grasp of them) and i just give up. we're to different.
maybe one day ill form an opinion that everyone else has to agree on for me to feel like im worth something. until then,ill have to keep being an individual.
if everyone agrees, no one is thinking.
what would comments to others regarding me be then? yes, they were public, but you didnt even address them to me. despite them being about me. thats where i come ito "on the side"
see, i didnt "mock" or "attack" YOU on the side. i approached you directly in a private manner, to your face.
The problem with your stance is that on this forum (especially in the science threads), you are judged/evaluated by not only what you write but also how you write it (i.e. present yourself).
oh well.
When you present yourself on a board such as this, all that anyone has to go on is what you write. It so happens grammar, spelling, and sentence structures are factored into how you are perceived.
Where I work, even email that is not "correct" is frowned on.
For example, if I wrote:
“i is an sientist”
You would immediately suspect my education level was not up to par with being said scientist.
This isn't Mrs. Grundy's self-esteem class. There are math questions that are settled. You don't get to have an opinion. If you have questions, take them to a textbook.
The same pretty much applies to your jabbering about gravity. It is fairly easy to come up with fantasy theories about "concentrating" gravity or traveling faster than light, but any useful and testable idea will involve some mathematics -- not exactly your strong suit. Your "ideas" do not even amount to clever science fiction technobabble. If the did, they would at least be coherent and amusing.
Now, about your approach to me, the less said the better for you. You sent me an incoherent freepmail accusing me of somehow changing my position from support of your positions to mocking you. I can't even imagine where I might have supported you on this thread. Maybe on some other thread dealing with politics? Maybe. But believe it or not, science doesn't answer to politics. They don't ask the same kinds of questions.
People, not just those who reply to you, do judge you by your ablity to write English. Every post of yours is not just looked at here, but by those at DU and Echelon (and probably by the GRU for that matter.) Romance may be fleeting but the Internet lasts longer that herpes.
That would be
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1165395/posts?page=996#996
To which I responded:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1165395/posts?page=1027#1027
Note to self: if you use the spell checker it inserts HTML, which then screws up the automatic URL linking.
Communication only happens when your message is taken seriously. We can read your broken syntax. Trust me, that isn't your biggest problem.
The following quote seems apropos here:
"If the words don't say it, the mind didn't think it." - Richard Mitchell
A combination of ethos and logos, as it were. Unfortunately, creationists almost always resort to pathos..
Followed by sinking into bathos.
Constantly, and the "deductive" logic is so compelling that we get results like this.
i searched my sent fiels, and i find nothing that claims you supported me. i said i supported you, and then noted that you didnt even make an attempt to follow my reasoning.
and ive taken my questions to a text book. problem? textbooks on clusters dont exist yet!
i see where you are coming from, but i still hold that this is a blog, not a workplace, not an email to a coworker, not even a post-it note. i value this for sheer conversation without the muddles of profession.
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