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.
Actually, 601.
How can you believe in an afterlife? Have you proven it with science?
balrog666: Not by biologists.
According to H.H.Pattee, biologists are not concerned with the question. Physicists on the other hand are quite concerned by the question and have indeed broadly concluded that the difference between that which is alive and that which is not is information (Pattee, Rocha, Yockey, et al). Information is defined by Shannon as a successful communication. For instance, when a cell no longer communicates, it is dead.
Many biologists consider physical laws, artificial life, robotics, and even theoretical biology as largely irrelevant for their research. In the 1970s, a prominent molecular geneticist asked me, "Why do we need theory when we have all the facts?" At the time I dismissed the question as silly, as most physicists would. However, it is not as silly as the converse question, Why do we need facts when we have all the theories? These are actually interesting philosophical questions that show why trying to relate biology to physics is seldom of interest to biologists, even though it is of great interest to physicists. Questioning the importance of theory sounds eccentric to physicists for whom general theories is what physics is all about. Consequently, physicists, like the skeptics I mentioned above, are concerned when they learn facts of life that their theories do not appear capable of addressing. On the other hand, biologists, when they have the facts, need not worry about physical theories that neither address nor alter their facts. Ernst Mayr (1997) believes this difference is severe enough to separate physical and biological models: "Yes, biology is, like physics and chemistry, a science. But biology is not a science like physics and chemistry; it is rather an autonomous science on a par with the equally autonomous physical sciences."
"Ultimately there is no right or wrong period. It's all defined by human desire."
You made my point exactly as to the social consequences of athestic evolutionary thought. It produces a society that is totally self centered. I am trully sorry that you cannot grasp this and its danger. However, I must again concede that even if a society devoid of things other than self is a natural, and undesireable, result of evolutionary thought being fully embraced - that does not prove macro evolution to be wrong.
It should however, give "theistic" evolutionists pause about what they are giving "aid and comfort to."
With a side order of bagpipes.
"I agree very strongly with betty boop that the most significant question about the origin of life is where and how biological information began. And with regard to the sun as a possible source for such information, I share her doubts. For one thing, although photons can carry information, what type of information can be generated spontaneously by the sun? And what might have happened at a very unique point in solar history that it could give rise to information in non-living matter such that the non-living matter becomes beneficially communicative to itself and its environment?"
The only way it can be explained is that "life" as we understand it with all its complexities is an inherent property of matter. That given the right ingredients under the right conditions - life will come into existence because that is one of the extended physical/chemical properties of matter. Just as salt crystalls will form, under the right circumstances, so will life.
Of course I don't buy that for a minute, but it is the only way around the problems that the physical sciences see in your posts. Otherwise, it just couldn't happen - unless created. That is why I keep pointing out here that NASA is spending a great deal of effort to find the so called precursors to life at exterrestrial sites. Without saying so, they(many in science) have come to believe in the "intrinsic nature" origen of life hypothesis.
Somewhere in their heads there's a glimmer of awareness that they're stinking up the joint. Or, perhaps it fits in with the attempts of some to portray the situation on these threads as symmetrical.
That too would be a pipe dream. I don't see the evos bludgeoning with their own ignorance, rampantly misquoting, playing "twist and shout", flinging deliberate fallacies about like confetti, or doing much at all besides knocking down one falsehood after another with evidence. But then, we have evidence.
Luke 21:29-31
29 And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree, and all the trees;
30 When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand.
31 So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand.
Israel (the fig tree which was captive into all nations) "When they shoot forth", summer is now nigh at hand.
I don't know the day or the hour, but it sure looks like summer.
You got nuttin', monkey boy. Except a one-way ticket to hell!
</creationist mode>
They display the howler monkey syndrome in full, a form of red herring, distraction, Ad Hominem, or whatever you want to call it.
Or the year or the decade or the century ...
...but it sure looks like summer.
Or what scientists call "spurious precision."
So in your world is one day like a thousand years or not?
Does your family call you the "stubborn one".
?
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