[net.religion] 'Missing Chain' question for today.

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?

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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!"

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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!

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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