Posted on 07/06/2005 6:51:06 PM PDT by infocats
In the fall of 1900, a young German physicist, Max Planck, began making calculations about the glow emitted by objects heated to high temperature. In retrospect, it seems like a small-bore problem, just the task to give a young scientist at the beginning of his career.
But if the question sounds minor, Planck's answer was not. His work led him to discover a new world, the bizarre realm of quantum mechanics, where matter is both a particle and a wave and where the predictable stability of Newton gives way to probabilistic uncertainty.
As Dennis Overbye of The New York Times once put it in these pages, Planck had grasped "a loose thread that when tugged would eventually unravel the entire fabric of what had passed for reality."
Physicists reeled. But physics survived. And once they got over their shock, scientists began testing Planck's ideas with observation and experiment, work that eventually produced computer chips, lasers, CAT scans and a host of other useful technologies - all made possible through our new understanding of the way the world works.
Biologists might do well to keep Planck in mind as they confront creationism and "intelligent design" and battle to preserve the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Usually, when confronting the opponents of evolution, biologists make the case that evolution should be taught because it is true.
They cite radiocarbon dating to show that Earth is billions of years old, not a few thousand years old, as some creationists would have it. Biologists cite research on microbes, or the eye, or the biology of the cell to shoot down arguments that life is so "irreducibly complex" that only a supernatural force or agent could have called it into being, as intelligent designers would have it.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Remember "Newton's Apple"? Ira shoulda stuck to kids shows :)
That's only if you consider 42 to be young and someone who had his PhD 21 years earlier and was director of a prestigious institute to be at the "beginning" of a career.
David Suzuki is living proof of that assertion ;-)
OH, For Heaven's sake! Let's just claim modern creationists also believe the world is flat and the sun revolves around the earth. I know many Christians who believe in a Creator, but none who are stuck in this silly NYTimeswarp.
Your comments are as fact-filled as your tagline...
ping!
There are Young Earth Creationist FReepers (not a LOT, but not an insignificant number) and one of the most prominent Creationist "research" outfits, the Institute for Creation Research, is still a bastion of Young Earth Creationism.
Yep....don't even have to be in the field, once you really begin to understand a field even as a layman, the repeated errors in science reporting are just as obvious.
Anyway, I noticed that people noticed the egregious NYT blunder regarding "radiocarbon" dating, but never actually said what it was.
For the benefit of those who may not know, it's actually a common Creationist belief that ALL dating of old objects is "radiocarbon" dating; actually it's only used for very recent, biological items....I believe it goes back only 50,000 years....will have to look that up.
When rocks billions of years old are dated a variety of other techniques are used such as argon-argon, etc.
didnt see you were already here.
agreed, this article sucks!
I loved that show! Ira reminded me of a less goofy version of Gabe Kaplan.
Not always. I'm a creationist. I believe the earth is billions of years old. But I'm not pig-headed about it. It is certainly possible it's only 6000 years old. I just see more scientific evidence for old earth.
The point is not how old the earth is. The point is that God created man and the universe. God could have chosen any number of ways to do it including doing it in six literal days 6000 years ago. I don't have a clue how he did it other than what's been left to us via the inspired words Moses wrote down in Genesis.
I have actually seen people not accept Christianity just because of this young earth interpretation of Genesis. What's more important IMO is to understand the true gospel of Jesus Christ and what Christianity is focused on rather than getting lost in this one issue.
I met Suzuki years ago as a kid. Yes, he's very passionate and often stubborn about his beliefs, but he's also very sincere about them, and is a nice guy to boot.
Wrong. There is nothing about Evolution which requires "species development in minute increments." Evolution only requires that natural selection favors (selects) certain indviduals for reproduction over others based on the suitability of those individuals to the environment in which they live. To the extent that such selection favors certain genetic mutations/characteristics and leads to the perpetuation of such genetic characteristics to the exclusion of others, speciation occurs.
Gould's hypothesis on punctuated equilibrium was that rather than this process occurring gradually over millions of generations, in the case of sufficient selective pressure, it would occur in a matter of thousands of generations. Such selective pressure could be provided by catastrophe or geographic isolation.
Under punctuated equlibirium, you have to think of evolution as proceeding like John Travolta's career. Instead of a steady and linear procession, it consists of spectacular bursts of activity interspersed within long, boring lulls of failed attempts at variation :-)
That's a wonderful simile. I'm going to use it from now on!
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