Re: Boy dies after being hit by train

Christopher A. Lee wrote:

On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:40:23 +0100, Chris Tolley
<cj.tolley@xxxxxxxxxxx (ukonline really)> wrote:

Christopher A. Lee wrote:

On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:30:09 -0700 (PDT), Ian
<ian.groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The problem with your explanation is that you brought subjective values
into it (stupid, clever), which Darwinism does not need.

These are not subjective values in this context. They are a clear
shorthand for "takes actions which increase personal risk despite
clear indications" and "takes actions which reduce personal risk
because of clear indications." Intelligent people can be very stupid.

There's actually no such thing as Darwinism any more than Faradayism,
Hawkingism etc.

No, but there are such things as abbreviations, and armed with that
knowledge you should be able to perceive that I'm using the word
Darwinism as shorthand for "the Darwinian explanation of the phenomena
which have been observed in Natural History and related disciplines".

It makes it look as if there has been no progress in the last 150
years.

That's an inference on your part, but not an implication on mine.

It is only part of the modern synthesis. Darwin didn't come up with
evolution himself. It was already widely known for at least a couple
of generations.

The observation that collected fossils changed and diverged over time
was given various labels including transformation, before they settled
on evolution - which simply means change over time.

In fact the oldest understanding of what fossils are, that I have
found, comes from Leonardo da Vinci.

Darwin's grandfather Erasmus was an evolutionist when it meant
something to be believed rather than an accepted scientific fact. More
than two centuries ago. Which is how creationists use the word today
to give the impression that it (and other areas of science they
wrongly imagine are part of evolution) is merely a belief.

Fair enough. But the problem is that when a word is used, it doesn't
necessarily always mean the same thing as when someone else used it. Nor
does it mean that the person now using it believes anything that the
previous person who used it believed.

Since when there has been a major change in how scientists think:
nobody "believes" explanations any more - they accept them because of
the strength of the evidence, the results of research, the predictive
power of the explanations etc. This is as big a contribution by Darwin
to science as his work on evolution.

Lamarck had an unscientific explanation for the fact of evolution, of
inherited acquired characteristics. But given the lack of knowledge at
the time, it was actually justified. He had seen for example big well
fed parents producing big well-fed kids, big strong village blacksmith
producing big strong kids working the same forge, etc. Not to mention
the results of selective breeding on the farm.

Darwin's contribution was the first scientifically derived one, which
superceded this. It sparked off more research into the fact of
evolution by contributing natural selection but predicting mechanisms
of heredity and mutation that he did not himself know.

The juggernaut of science has gone on from there in the last 150 years
to find these mechanisms, the effects of which get filtered by natural
selection. Specifically DNA, its components and the garbling effect of
mutagens when the components are copied.

A secondary result of the understanding of DNA is that another method
of evolution was found in stable populations: genetic drift due to the
effect of dominant and regressive genes.

Eh? Minor point. Back when genes were called factors, that was known
about, wasn't it? And isn't that long before DNA was understood?

Calling it Darwinism ignores all this and encourages the thinking that
all there is to evolution is natural selection. Ignoring the work of
the last 150 years and the vast confirmation from genetics and other
fields.

It doesn't Chris. In my case, and probably others, it principally
indicates the lingo that one is used to using. I'm lazy, like most
people, and especially on usenet, I don't tend to write in the same kind
of way as if I were writing a scientific paper (not that I would be,
these days) or an undergraduate essay (not that I would be, these days).

As well as giving the impression that it is an ideology. Which is
encouraged by fundamentalists who want people to think it is one that
competes with their own.

I don't believe so. To give a vaguely on-topic response, I believe that
rail travel is more sensible in the abstract than car travel. And yet I
rack up more miles in my car than by train. Just because one holds a
view about X, it doesn't mean one can't hold a different view about Y.
Not even when the things in the domain of X have some kind of overlap
with the things in the domain of Y. Fundamentalist capitalists can be
nice to their pets and kids, for example.

The word evolutionist also carries the same overtones.

It's actually a form of thought control, people hear the words and
have a mental picture of an -ism where there isn't one.

I assure you, I'm not trying to control your or anyone else's thoughts.
So you can put the foil away. ;-)

Meanwhile, CRD is on record as saying that what motivated him to find
things out was a desire to answer the big questions, like "why we are
here?" Credit where it's due: he and those who work in his and related
fields have done a very good job of explaining how we come to be here,
leaving aside the fuzzy grey/bright white/or more probably, black, area
at the very front end of the process. But I think that there's only a
limited domain of things where the "why" question is adequately
addressed by solving the "how does it happen" question - e.g. why is the
sky blue? Questions like "why did Fred kill Peter?" are not answered in
any meaningful sense by showing that it was done with a gun. And from
where I sit, "why are we here?" looks more like the second type of
question than the first.

--
http://gallery120232.fotopic.net/p9632998.html
(43 195 at Nottingham, Aug 1982)
.

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