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.
it isnt "strong" and "stupid" correlating, it is the "strong and stupid" achieve dominance. they are bright enough to work together, so they resort to a priaml method, might makes right. this is stage one and two of Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning.
Good point, but the strong and smart are more likely to be leaders than bullies. I'm not arguing some universal case her. I'm merely pointing out that different environments favor different traits.
Intelligence may be a general purpose strength, but it won't necessarily win a fist fight.
What I am arguing against here is the notion that evolution has a fixed direction. It doesn't. It fills niches.
any teacher on biology i ever had.
this is something they point out, not myself, though i see where they are coming from. for example, when we are developing in the womb, we have gills, which eventually seal up and the sac becomes lungs.
No. Evolutionary theory makes predictions that can be tested. A trivial one is that cladistics should lead to tree-like structures rather than lawn-like. Lawn-like structures are never seen; tree-like are. An abundunce of lawn-like structures would refute evolutionary theory.
What cladistics structures are prediction by creationism? What would falsify these predictions
The failure of creationism to make any such testable predictions only shows that creationism fails to rise to the level of a theory. At best it's just bible-babble.
But notice how human-like the baby is. We keep find this. It's as if the "unique" human appearance is an instance of a thing called "neoteny," which you could look up, in which a population evolves to keep a juvenile appearance throughout its life. Humans, in other words, have evolved to retain the "baby primate" look on into adulthood.
We do something similar to animals when we domesticate them. In the last several decades the whole sequence has been observed under a modern lens as the process was demonstrated with a population of initially wild foxes.
The point is that evolution says some useful things worth exploring, predictions that suggest lines of research. Creation says, "Well, He could have made it like that." Everything is a big "So what?" if you've already decided it's all supernatural.
"More importantly, in the "half a wing" case, you neglect that there is substantial evidence that the half-way thing existed at least once (more like several times at several places) in nature."
i did not say it doesn't/didn't exist, i said how does that "prove" evolution conclusively? so scales elongated and got soft. why dont we see those half avery/saurons today? we see their proposed ancestors, but as with humans, no missing link to its origins.
8-) I think Darwin thoroughly refuted himself a century and a half ago when he said that the theory of evolution would be disproved if the fossil record did not, in the century to come, show itself to be replete with transitional forms.
As those gaps disappear, so does the need for a Creator.
BUMP
my reference is the teachers themselves. im not sure, where you are saying i am mistaken? people who profess to be more studied said exactly that. "developing humans mimic the evolutionary process"
single cell becomes multi-celled, turns into an inhabitant of water (gills), grows fin, fins develop into arms and legs, those develop fingers. a spinal cord happens after a hard spine-like growth develops, and the tail tucks itself and "disappears" (though some children are still born with tails and "fins" as cited in 1999 with a tibetan child being worshiped as a god because he had a tail.) and eventually, this single cell becomes a full grown recognizable human.
hell, my developmental psychology teacher Lisa Endberg uses a book written by a Dr. Berger to cite what i just said you.
Not entirely true. What disappears if the need for godlets to keep pushing the arrow while it's in flight.
Do you have an exact title and author for that book? It sounds line it might have been written in the 1920s.
Did you study punctuation under e. e. cummings? And did you just shift your ground? A minute ago it was impossible for the halfway thing to exist. Now it existed once but it doesn't prove anything.
We don't see the extinct forms today because 1) populatons continue to evolve, and 2) extinctions happen. The latter point is just another thing that creationism doesn't explain particularly well but evolution does. Extinction happens (and populations continue to evolve) because things change. We also see plenty of intermediates today, as has been pointed out. That colugo thing, a fine glider, is perhaps evolving flight.
You're probably going to argue that it isn't evolving anything because it's "perfectly" adapted now even if it's highly endangered. But evolution says that everything in the present or in the fossil record is or was "perfectly" adapted for some environment. Some environments may never have been that big and some environments change or go away over time. All the intermediate forms along the way were well-enough adapted to survive.
i didnt say invent, neither did Pat. it is a product.
the chinese did not invent guns, the Pope sanctioned and blessed guns and gunpowder for use in wars. it was a controlled substance that the church funded the studies to make. if the gun powder was not blessed, the powder was not used.
if you are talking about the Ten Commandments and univerals laws according to them being in China, get out your globes. please place your finger on the origins of the Jewish nation. now please point to it's biggest trading partners in history.
If you had actually read Darwin's chapters on the geological record you'd be embarrassed to say that. But if you could be embarrassed you wouldn't be a YEC.
WOW - that's highly enlightening!
i never said it was impossible. cite my wording, please.
i said it is not a logical jump to conclusively state that evolution is the only truth in development of species. i have stated several times that i believe evolution is plausable. i have in those same breaths admitted that Creationism is eqaully valid. you are stating that i denounce evolution as a whole, which i myself have stated several times is not the case.
evolution is the means, God is the end.
Extinction happens (and populations continue to evolve) because things change.
thats still doesnt show me the skeletal remains of the missing link.
i am also yet to say evolution is 100% untrue. all i say is it is an incomplete theory. it does not even attempt to explain origins of life. origins are key to understanding direction. evolution is stating it is the direction. "where from and to where?" is all i ask.
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