From: Thomas Buckner (tcbevolver@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Aug 31 2005 - 17:47:05 MDT
--- "J. Andrew Rogers"
<andrew@ceruleansystems.com> wrote:
> The real point to this is that for the vast
> majority of the population,
> their belief in 'evolution' is as irrational as
> their belief in
> 'creationism'. Just about everybody is making
> a guess based on what their
> friends and family believe, not because they
> have a frickin' clue one way or
> the other. In neither case is such belief
> constructive.
Point taken; however, I read an interesting essay
(forget where) on ideology: the author used the
word 'ideology' in a more expansive and less
judgmental way than I had ever understood it. The
simple fact is that nobody could get through the
day without making an awful lot of assumptions
about the world around them; as desirable as
fact-finding and rational analysis are, it's
impossible to apply this sort of systematic,
microscopic attention to every activity and
social interaction in real time, and nobody does.
Scott Adams deals nicely with this subject toward
the end of "The Dilbert Future" (a humorous but
actually rather enlightening book). To illustrate
how "things could be completely different yet
look exactly the same" he offers a thought
experiment: what if gravity doesn't exist, but
seems to because everything in the universe,
including us, is expanding? He reports that
objections to his little theory fall into two
categories: those that have obvious errors, and
those filled with equations and concepts he
claims he can't understand, based on physics
experiments he can't replicate.
The situation isn't quite so severe where
evolution is concerned. Evolution happens all the
time (that's why this year's flu is not last
year's flu). Ongoing speciation is observed in
fish in Africa.
But what of it? This topic ain't very SL4, hence
Ben's original apology.
Tom Buckner
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:52 MDT