Re: possibly OT: NYT article on GA creationism/evolution debate

["Shapiro, Mark" <mshapiro@EXCHANGE.FULLERTON.EDU>]

Hugh,

Every teacher knows that signs of life can appear spontaneously.  Just announce a pop quiz in your class!

Mark Shapiro
http://irascibleprofessor.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Hugh Haskell [mailto:hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM]
Sent: Sunday, September 01, 2002 10:46 AM
To: PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu
Subject: Re: possibly OT: NYT article on GA creationism/evolution debate


At 7:44 -0700 9/1/02, Michael Bowen wrote:
> Given that Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" has a title that sounds so
> much like the last quoted phrase in Hugh's message, I cannot help wondering
> whether much of the current philosophical war over evolution could have
> been sidestepped had Darwin selected a title such as "On Descent Through
> Modification" instead.
You may have a point. Darwin used the phrase "descent with
modification" several times in his works. And, when pointed out to
some creationists, that definition of evolution seems to mollify them
(not all, however). Of course Darwin was referring to how new species
arise with his title phrase "Origin of Species," and not to how life
arises. He explicitly left that subject alone. He readily admitted
that he had no idea how life first came into being, although he
suspected that it was a natural phenomenon. Of course, he also had no
idea what the mechanism of modification was, either, but that could
be observed, both in living and fossil species, so he could feel free
to speculate on the idea of "descent with modification," which he
took to be an observational fact.

His idea was that individual species "originated" gradually by
modifications of earlier ones, rather than appearing suddenly with no
antecedents.

The idea of life appearing spontaneously was not unheard of in the
mid-nineteenth century. Pasteur was involved in a furious debate with
several other biologists on just that subject. The conventional
thinking, which Pasteur thought was false, was that things like
maggots, arose spontaneously on rotting meat--that they were a form
of life that had not existed before their observation. Although
Pasteur apparently did not show conclusively that his detractors were
wrong, it was ultimately proved, of course, that the maggots were the
larvae of flies who had laid the eggs in the meat, apparently
unobserved, and that other forms of life that appeared spontaneously
were the result of airborne spores. But in the nineteenth century
this was cutting edge biology.

I sometimes wonder if the nineteenth century's fascination with this
apparent "spontaneous" appearance of life wasn't at least a small
factor in the rise of Christian fundamentalism at the end of the
century.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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