arndt@lymph.DEC (02/04/85)
Since the ostrich, being a bird, has claws on its wings like a reptile, is it on it's way to becoming a reptile or is it a reptile on it's way to birdland? ----------------------- Extra! Extra! Get your red hot ad hoc hypotheses to fit the new finds! "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory; but a META-PHYSICAL RESEARCH PROGRAMME" Karl Popper (him again!) UNENDED QUEST:AN INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY (La Salle,Ill.Open Court,1976) p.168. "Our theory of evolution has become, as Popper described, one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus 'outside empirical science' but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems, have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training." Birch and Ehrlich, "Evolutionary History and Population Biology" in NATURE, April 1967, p.351. "With the failure of these many efforts science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate. After chiding the theologian for his reliance upon myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past." Loren Eisley, THE IMMENSE JOURNEY,(NY:Vintage,1957)p199. "Extra! Extra! Evolution is true - it must be so because we all say so!" -------------------------------------- Of course true-believers, in the meantime keep checking Frank Purdue's chickens for teeth! Wait a minute!!! What's that? IT'S A CALL FROM THE SIDELINES! It's Stephen Gould's famous 'punctuated equilibria' play. That'll make mince meat of the other side's defense. Of course. Evolution must have taken LEAPS (but mother don't alow no leaps of faith of the religious kind here!) So it's up the down staircase of life we went. Er, what's that? Who are YOU? Michael Polanyi? Not another philosopher of science! Ok speak your piece (hee hee). Say, you're not a, ugh, Christian are you? No. That's good. "Accordingly, the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars forming the lower level. You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive the grammar of a language from its vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a good style does not provide the content of a piece of prose." THE TACIT DIMENSION (Routlege & Kegan Paul,1966)p36. Polanyi also makes the same statement about a watch or a biological 'machine' like a cell - that the sum of the material parts does not tell you what it IS! There is, he claims, a qualitative differnce between the sum of the metals,etc of a watch and the watch as a watch - the design, the engineering principle! --------------------------- Doesn't he know about DNA??? But - hee hee - Where's the pattern of the DNA come from? Anyplace but (a)GOD, because I KNOW there's no GOD. I mean I've looked and looked . . . . Beside, all those who DO believe in GOD are so boring . . . . So . . . Who put the bompt in the bompt de bompt bompt bompt!? See you later aligators, Ken Arndt