[thechat] The Origin of the Human Species

Jonathon Isaac Swiderski jswiders at cs.oberlin.edu
Tue Sep 17 17:23:00 CDT 2002


Tomorrow, the cows mooved Madhu Menon to write:

(heh heh -- gotta love that 9+ hour time diff. . .)

> http://www.cleveland.com/debate/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/news/1032168773131071.xml
>
>  From the "what came first: the Adam or the baby" department:

Note that the people who are supporting this 'intelligent design' rubbish
aren't biologists -- a Berkeley law professor and a suburban Cleveland
chemist.

Within the community of people who actually study biology and natural
history according to scientific principles, evolution is the next closest
thing to known fact.

To argue that evolution is 'a mere theory' (similar lines to which have
been used as *actual arguments* to the teaching of creationism and other
such antiscientific philosophy) is to completely ignore the standard
meaning of the word -- as anyone who's cracked a dictionary.com can read
(http://dictionary.com/search?q=theory), a theory is the highest level of
scientific knowledge, knowledge "that has been repeatedly tested or is
widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural
phenomena."

-j
(son of two evolutionary/developmental biologists, with various other
scientists -- physicists, mathematicians, sociologists -- for uncles and
grandparents. . .)

--
Jonathon Isaac Swiderski \\ dangercat-20 at dangercat.net
cs.oberlin.edu/~jswiders  \\  www.dangercat.net/?id=mt

Science is like sex, sometimes something useful comes
   out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.
                                   -- Richard Feynman




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