Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Words of sanity.

Oh yeah. Stuck for words again and hoping educational policy is going to be influenced by your's and fm's blurts. What a low opinion you have of everybody.

Right on cue however ossobuco has a new sig. line--

You have nothing fm. You can't understand that I know what your side are up to. I know all about the rhetoric of reform movements, full of good intentions as they all seem to be, and how they work as a diffusing growth into the body politic to promote the welfare (power and control) of the lower-middle class, which hates productive work, (see Veblen) and its flatterers in media, and the thousands of tentacles it has for enclosing the rest of us in its vice like grip. Yes sir!! I know every move it makes simply because it has made them. I can work out the details later.

Like Yossarian said--"What's shithead up to now" when he saw Scheisskopf pinning a notice up in the PX.

You should get a stall on a fairground fm.

ed is just an innocent.

Beware the Greeks bearing gifts!!.

I suppose when you are a minnow in what Foucault called the "carceral archipeligo", and schools are incarceration units, just for being guilty of getting to 5, you might well be like a minnow in the Mississippi and not know a thing about the water you're swimming in. It just is. Hence a fish out of water is a suitable comparison for when you are asked to step out of it.

Are you sure he did say that?

That's obvious from your signature line. The only book on the philosophy of science i've read was one of Popper's, but it's been so long ago that i do not recall the title. I was interested because a friend told me Popper had given a good review of the history of science.

Ive always gotten a kick out of Norwood R Hanson'sPatterns of Discovery which was produced in the late 50's just prior to the increase of electronic sensors and computer linked detectors. His thees were that we "filter" rather than observe. Id agree except he was about 50 years too late, as the "detector revolution" caught on, the filter of which he spoke, was deposed and the detector . (as well as the integrators used thwerein) became a series of tools that dismissed his point. (As it does most "philosphy " of science)

Science is a bitch that way, though. It'll come up and bite ya in the ass every time. But good science accepts that, and profits by it. The Michelson-Morley experiment is the best example. Its results completely destroyed the contemporary (1880s) state of theoretical physics. There were some feeble attempts to rehabilitate the "luminous aether" dodge, but most physicists had to accept that the pins had been knocked from under their theories. It paved the way for what is often called the "second scientific revolution." It also made it easier for people to accept Einstein's contention that the speed of light is a constant in his theory of special relativity twenty years later.

I consider it to be the best example of the self-correcting nature of scientific investigation.

Yeah--it's a phrase that sticks in the mind. Does it bother you Francis? He had an alternative to it--"capillary network". Like a fishing net.

You don't think we have all these different coloured bins to sort out our waste for ecological reasons do you? They are merely exercises in power for power's own sake. That would be simple minded.

You don't actually think that promoting the teaching of evolution has anything to do with the science of evolution? Not at your age surely and with all your experience of the real world? The TSA isn't bothered about making planes safe. It's concerned with having everybody jumping through its own hoops. Just for the sake of seeing it done.

When I was finishing up my diss in the mid 70's, and got to know several very big name geologists who were the foundation theorists of tectonics(John Rodgers, Marshall Kay etc). As the Continental Drift hypothesis grew into a well established and observed theory, both Rodgers and KAy said that they were gonna hang it up since theior own theories had counted on earth motion to be primarily vertical and not, as it turned out, the results of deep pile throw "rugs" crashing into each other from the side. It was actually embarrasing to them since they hadnt been part of the new tectonic theory.
HAppens all the time.
Look at Einstein. HE missed jumping on to quantum theory and then regretted it as his worst mistake.

Ah, but good, honest scientist that he was, he admitted it.

But you think evolution has no flaws ?

Which does not apply to a lot of self proclaimed scientists on this thread when it comes to evolution having areas that need a lot of work.

Evolution is what it is, what do you mean by flaws?

There you go again. Who are you speaking of and what evisdence do you provide re: that statement?
At least your departures into the world of silly- walks dont involve four pages of run on sentences and unconnected phrases.

They are just "brilliantine" phrase droppers Io. They love "quantum theory" best. It makes them sound like elite mathemeticians. To themselves I mean.
They haven't a clue what it actually means.

For the process to suddenly exist when life started, it has to be a unique feature of the chemicals involved in life. This suggests it is a chemical process that would have been selecting chemicals to "survive" better than others. This places evolution as a function of the increasing complexity of the universe. There has never, to my knowledge, been an attempt to explain evolution as more than a complex life form process.

The processes of evolution are not understood properly. How are males and females difeerent in their handing on of learned traits ? What does it take for a trait to be learned and handed down to the next generation ? Why do life forms change to the point of no longer existing in their original form simply to exist ? Have there really been mass extinctions or are these a result of how we collect data ? How many fossils are required to prove we have a true representation of a species ? Why are humans not considered a natural process when it comes to the survival of other species and the evolution of those species ?

Cause and effect exist everywhere but the major cause of life is not known. Without a known cause, measuring effect may be limited in accuracy. There could very well be an extra dimension to life that is ignored. Any theory on how life changes will need all the dimensions of life to be measured.
I will endeavour to fix that for you.

Why don't you all just call it a day because your getting nowhere. You are all on one side of the fence or the other, there's no common ground. Most of you are diametrically opposed to the others views, so there is no honest debate, just preaching. Your beliefs are set in stone, so there's no room for compromise or as I said honest debate.

if you say so

It's as I suspected, ye all love it. Mutual Verbal Masturbation. Carry on boys, whatever gets you off.

Perhaps you are thinking too linearly. There could have been several false starts in life and each organic product could have remained in the sequence and be recycled in a later attempt. Also, and more importantly, the properties that we associate with life , perhaps didnt occur at the same time. We already have several models of a "cell wall" that seem to work and they could be independent of others occurences. Further, the ability to reproduce and to transmit something similar to "genetic information" could be a relatively recent occurence (Evidence of life first goes back to the Isua Formation where the proper isotopes of carbon exist). Since the ribonucleic acids are the building block chemical structure responsible and which we only presume has gone back to reside in the fossils of those species that are of existing families and phyla, we have no evidence that this family of chemicals extends back beyond any time period from which we can infer the genomes through existing species. Weve had "fish-like" creatures since the late preCambrian, we only infer that, since todays fish use DNA, so did they. BUT WE DONT KNOW, we only infer.
Lastly, and most important, abiogenesis has nothing to do with evolution and we dont have any information that says it does. It seems to be some "force fitting" that occupies popular science and Creationists trying to create false holes in logic.

Ill say that evolution is not necessarily a march to higher complexity, it is more a mechanism to equate a phenotype with an accomodating environment. You are, in part, paraphrasing Dollos Law (one of the laws within the theory of evolution). This law states mathematically, that , in evolution, everything is merely irreversable, which ay appear to be a march to complexity. There are many many species that have actually "devolved" from more complex to simpler. Most parasites are just that.

I assume that you actually mean "learned responses" , since "traits" actually means something in the genome.

In geologic time, the environment is constantly changing. Life adjusts to these changes by changing habit, structure, function , and then species traits. Evolution parallels the environment and population density.

The data about the species "gone missing" has always paralleled some cataclismic action that got recorded in the stratigraphic record. Eg , in the P/Tr boundary, we see an incredible loss of oxygen and a great increase of acid balance in the rocks that correspond to the P/Tr. There are specific events that sveral surveys have show happened at the same time
Possibly a huge bolide smacked down in an area called the Vreedervort and there is some evidence that the bolide hit was so strong oit actually opened fractures of magma on the other side of the planet. This left a bad heat/acid balance/ and then a"nuclear winter" recorded in the sediments

As far as the K/T boundary, there is evidence of a big bolide at the Chixclub . However, the mass ectinction here was more complex and several scientists actually are presenting new evidence regarding possible multiple hits and severe climate change before the bolide hit that was due to the opening of the ATlantic and several species , including dinosaurs were already going extinct before the bolide hit.

One will do. When we find a really different fossil form from its near relatives, because its different, we call it a fossil species (which is different than a biological species)

As far as I know, we are. The last mass extinction (the disappearance of the Pleistocene megafauna) still has a popular following in the "Humans hunted the **** out of em" theory. Who knows?

Could be Im sure. Nobody is so fuckin full of themselves to think they have more than just a few answers and most of us in the rock business usually constrict our work to limited areas of practice. The amateurs have way more freedom of opinion because there are huge amounts of facts and data that would have to be reviewed as a full time job and not just reading "wikipedia".
The only thing I saw that shed some light on the multiple "start up of life" hypothesis was an Argentinian biochemist who was doing work on early life chemicals in preCambrian rocks where he was certain he has evidence of phosphate based " early life structure'. I only sat in on one of his public reports and I havent seen anything published since the late 90's

I'm grammatically disappointed that you could think that.

That phrase, as it's written, doesn't stick in my mind..