Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

O ye nattering nabobs of creativity.

So easy to say. Spout might be better. Or gob-off.

Science, in the words of Meyerson is the reduction of diversity to identity. The diverse, brute facts are apprehended by the senses.

But for some strange reason to do with the actual nature of human life we are not content by what our senses tell us. We prefer to shoot such a bringer of sad tidings.

We hunger for explanations. And explanation consists of finding identity behind diversity. Control freaks hunger the most and thus are exquisitely susceptible to explanations and especially to those presented to them in return for cash or worship by expert control freaks who it can be presumed they seek to emulate. It is said to derive from a fear of the unknown and pretending that the unknown is known is a well tried method of assuaging such fears.

The simple fact that sensations cannot be completely rationalised by reduction to identities is simply Ignored by those exhibiting this hunger.

The physicist etc. has reduced the diversity to units of energy which has an exhange rate with matter and the energy/matter nexus seems to possess none of the qualities nature presents to our senses. We are presented with a diversity of patterns of one thing and it is the specific pattern we identify, define and sanctify with a name with the object itself having no sense of our granting it these privileges.

And all these separate identities are interdependent which is a very distressing idea for control freaks. However distressing it may be it is a simple fact that it is this interdependence which gives to things, including sentient beings, their reality. I know the "romantic" likes to think otherwise.

What they actually are, these abstractions from reality, is a microcosm in a network of relations between independent parts of an incalculable whole.

Observation tells us we are independent beings but that is an illusion based upon a profound ignorance of science. It is a relatively harmless illusion. What is harmful is the illusion that abstractions like "The Nation", "The State", "The Party" and "The Red Sox" can be independent entities outside of reality.

Modern science has demonstrated that the part of reality we can apprehend is a small fraction of the actual reality. Possibly a minute fraction. Because first, we can only see a bit of it, and second, our senses are limited. We can neither see or feel the largest molecules. Our microscopes can't see into matter because they are matter themselves.

The Universe is a product of these limitations. We have made it by selecting from a whole which is quantitatively and qualitatively different from our common sense apprehension of it.

Scope for weavers of the wind. Especially when the "mind" is the object abstracted from reality. Some say thought is secreted like bile. Some that mental activity is a system of conditioned reflexes. Some a tool for securing the satisfaction of kinetic wants. Some that it is a construction of the mind doing the investigation.

But one fact does emerge. It is that men of science act as if they believe in the abilty of the human intellect (their own usually) being able to make true judgments, using reason and logic, about the nature of the world and based on a faith in the mind's logical capacities (their own usually). The faith that the laws of thought are laws of things. And today's man of science is beavering away under the contingencies of the division of labour principle in miniscule corners of the miniscule part of reality we are capable of apprehending.

The others are opportunists like you lot on here.

If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
- G. K. Chesterton

And then what would they do with themselves?

Nothing. If "x" doesn't exist, "z" will not exist.

Most other lushes feel the same as you. They always believe that its their audience that is not getting it.

Ive been corrected on my last post. It was "LastThursdayism" not "Lastweekism" . Im sure it went over your head without a full quiver of google available to you.

You're confusing yourself with the "audience" again old chap.

Said like a true lush there shpendi. Shouldnt you be near passing out by now? Oh yeah, Ill bet that youre getting ready for sunrise services, so youll need to monitor your alcoholic intake.

"Sunrise services"????!!!! Are you kidding? I never egress the pit until the complex path through space of the highest transom in the bay windows has occluded the sun from my view. On cloudy days I have to guess.

The sun doesn't rise effemm. That's pre-Gallileo thinking of the very most scientific ignorance. Peasant like.

Souffles rise. Shirt laps occasionally. Skirts. Nighties.

Never the sun. You're just an old fashioned romantic at heart. Why don't you admit it?

The semantic juggler drops one of his words and it lands on his head, as usual (it's almost always a pummel of huge disjointed, strung together words -- ouch, that must hurt). From the space shuttle or the space station, the sun obviously isn't rising but that's a matter of perspective -- we should take up a collection and send Spendi up there (without a spacesuit). It's still called a sunset and a sunrise and from an artist's perspective on the ground, as an example, that is correct (what else would anyone suggest it be renamed?). Obviously, Spendi is not an artist, not a scientist, nor a writer (unless a new edition of "The Sun Also Peaks Over the Edge of the Horizon" by Hemingway gets on the bookshelves) so he must be a mud wrestler. Is that what is going on at the pub? No wonder he can't see.

Spendi long ago picked his last nit but his petty triviality is something he can't seem to squelch.

Have fun in church throwing up on the bible in your pew.

"from an artist's perspective ". Sheesh. What's one of those from a Darwinian perspective. Darwin gave up art. It made no sense in his theory. In fact it exasperated him in the end.

BTW- how many favourable adaptations are possible in the insides of organisms compared to those in outward appearence? In, say, osmotic processes across membranes. Or effects on DNA of trace elements in various nutrients.



Can we take it that "damage" is always maladaptive.

And there's a scientific basis for astrology in that.

Rejecting evolution and embracing astrology (the moon, the planets and the stars mutate DNA on some higher power programming?) It figures. I told you not to go off the deep end -- there's no water in the pool.

Darwin's Audubon
Gerald Weissmann on the Art of Science
Reported by John Haberposted Jul 22, 2004


Darwin's Audubon: Science and the Liberal Imagination
Gerald Weissmann
Perseus, Cambridge, MA, 1998. 352 pages.
Read an excerpt of the book: Chapter 1


Editor's Note: "It seems appropriate that Audubon's tombstone in upper Manhattan was paid for and erected by the New York Academy of Sciences." It seems appropriate, too, for Gerald Weissmann to begin his "New and Selected Essays" with the meeting of Charles Darwin and John James Audubon.

In "Darwin's Audubon," the title essay in his latest collection, Weissmann traces more than just the personal and intellectual connections between a British biologist and an American artist (pictured above). He places Darwin's theoretical achievement fully within the rich intellectual currents of his time, including the arts, philosophy, and science.

As Weissman writes, many of his essays "advance the argument that scientific reasoning, like Enlightenment thought itself, has a strong aesthetic component, that science has as much to do with form as with function." He captures Darwin as a divinity student and Gertrude Stein's abandoned medical training, not to mention the more successful scientific careers of Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Carlos Williams. He follows the intricate narrative from W. H. Auden to the liposome and Henri Daumier to the deer tick.

Recent biographies have shown how Audubon arranged his compositions, even departing from life to bring out typical species behavior. In effect, they have seen Audubon as an artist and a student of phenotype. However, Weissmann"and Darwin"were there first.

Chapter 1. Darwin's Audubon
by Gerald Weissman
© 1998, Gerald Weissman



In assessing Audubon, whose firm grip on the popular imagination has scarcely lessened since 1826, we must as historians of science seriously ask who would remember him if he had not been an artist of great imagination and flair. . . . The chances seem to be very good that had he not been an artist, he would be an unlikely candidate for a dictionary of scientific biography, if remembered to science at all.
" Robert M. Mengel, Dictionary of
Scientific Biography (1970)

That pretty much describes how John James Audubon (1785-1851) is regarded as a scientist today. His name is missing from indexes of modem textbooks of ornithology, and our most eloquent natural scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, invokes Audubon only as a limner of "The Flamingo's Smile." Yet whatever honor is due Audubon as an artist of great flair and imagination"Winslow Homer regarded him the greatest of our water colorists"he was recognized by the most eminent of his contemporaries as their equal in natural science. But, alas, nowadays Audubon is honored more as a fan of the wild, a protoecologist, than as either the artist or the naturalist he considered himself. Leaving the art to others, I want to reassess whether Audubon should be "remembered to science at all" as his biographer suspects. By the standards of the day, he didn't do so badly. It was not for his art, but for his science that he was elected to all the learned societies; he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1830. Audubon shares that FRS with only one antebellum American, Benjamin Franklin"and with Newton and Boyle and the Darwins of the home team. His science as well as his art convinced the great Cuvier to introduce Audubon at the French Academy of Sciences in 1828, "The greatest monument yet erected by Art to Nature" said the Baron of the Birds of America. It seems appropriate that Audubon's tombstone in upper Manhattan was paid for and erected by the New York Academy of Sciences rather than its National Academy of Design.

Balance of chapter 1:

http://www.nyas.org/publications/readersReport.asp?articleID=14

Nah!! I reject the Ladies Home Journal caricatures of both--that's all.

Not the real things. You are just a bit confused LW. You think it's easy. Making it easy is just a bit of mumbo-jumbo to pick your pocket. It's called base flattery.

You read the Ladies' Home Journal? Is there something we don't know about you, other than you seldom make any sense?

Not any longer. It's repetitive. But one should know what the buggers are up to I feel.

He makes sense to himself and that's all that matters ??? isn't it?

Yeah, here's everything the Ladies Home Journal has printed about Charles Darwin:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Ladies+Home+Journal+evolution&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2007-26,GGGL:en

Ditto for astrology, or any implied "science of astrology."

Looks like Spendi had read a lot of Ladies Home Journals to come across their elaborate reporting or opining about evolution or astrology, and my guess is he came up empty handed -- he's already empty headed, full of multi-syllabic words he has no idea how to assemble into a coherent sentence. You'd think he'd realize by now that he might find more in National Geographic or Scientific American, or even his dreaded Discovery Magazine as far as the more popular sources.

Now that he's in the corner, he's trying to tippy-toe through the wet paint to exit the room.

BTW, if one only makes sense to oneself, they're considering entirely nuts.

I've personally have never considered unentirely nuts.