On Wed, 12 Jan 2000 Massie wrote:
>No I am not talking about Hal Lindsey and you know it and
>Lets stay to the issue
Yeesh! Sorry, I'll keep my jokes to myself. It's good to see
you're not a fan of his either. Now that I'm sitting up good
and straight...
>What the e word does not do is predict the future in terms of
>organism invention (not small modifications, but invention).
>What I clearly referred to would be the predictive power of
>evolutionary (meaning invention) theory to predict the next
>big organism.
I'm going to get my eyes checked next week, but still, for the
record, all you said was predictive power. But now it's
clarified, thank you.
Suppose you tell me you have the now rare skills to build a
car by hand. I say, "Wow! That's great, go ahead and build
one. I'd like to see it." So you start chugging away and
the next day I show up at your shop. "Well, where's your
car?" "This sort of this takes a long time," you explain.
To which I reply, "I'm not talking about pieces! I wanted
an entire automobile, and you have a couple of pieces that
anybody could put together," and I stomp off in a huff
muttering about frauds.
So you want the next big organism? OK, Thu. 24 Aug, 2000
about 50 km due north of the confluence of the Rio Negro
and the Amazon. (sorry, another ha ha)
Back to the issue. Of course e predicts speciation, but
given that what could be called serious biology has been
around for less than tens of decades, do you know what
you're asking for? I say not. You're slapping a straw
man around with red herrings. On the time scale we are
dealing with, we cannot predict and then CONFIRM a bona
fide speciation in the future. Since when has turning
to the past (fossil record, extant species assemblages)
been off limits for predictions for such theories? Do
you mean to tell me that predictions regarding crusty
starlight from across the universe are bogus because it
is from the past? Blowing off evolution is really fairly
easy when we declare the past off limits -- the past is
all we have to demonstrate what you want.
Grace and peace be with you. Jeff
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