The mention of ID seems to give many writers and commentators what they regard as a green light to blather on without taking a moment to grasp what they're writing about. Denouncing ID is one thing. Denouncing it without comprehending what the phrase refers to, which is amazingly common, is quite another.Gee, I wonder what other subject causes apparently smart people to behave like IDiots? What other subject gives people a green light to blather on when they don't have the slightest clue what they are talking about? Is there another subject that some people denounce without comprehending what it means? Hmmm .....
I continue to find this amazing. What other subject, both controversial and somewhat recondite, seems to license apparently smart people to write and speak in such an uninformed way?
Louis Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.1Actually, it would be even better to say that Agassiz looks better in the concrete than in the abstract [see Agassiz in the Concrete and Persecution of Religious Scientists]. By the 1920s (earlier in Europe) Agassiz's reputation had been severely damaged by his willingness to let religious convictions dictate his science.2
1. The story is apocryphal (a polite word for "false"). The quotation has been attributed to several men, including the President of Stanford, but all have denied it. Nevertheless, it's too good a story to abandon just because it happens to be untrue!
2. Stephen Jay Gould held the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology Chair at Harvard from 1982 until his death in 2002. Alexander Agassiz was Louis Agassiz's son. Alexander served as President of the National Academy of Sciences.
I was eight years old in late November 1963. I didn’t pay much attention to the TV news – some guy had been shot or something, and I wasn’t to know that C. S. Lewis had died until much later – but I was instantly taken by the eerie sound of the opening music of a new show. Yes, it was the very first episode of Dr Who, in glorious monochrome! I was a Whovian from the beginning, before it was cool. I’m so hip…
Lenski's humble E. coli have shown, among other things, how multiple small mutations can prepare the ground for a major change; how new species can arise and diverge; and that Gould was mistaken when he claimed that, given a second chance, evolution would likely take a completely different course. Most recently, the colonies have demonstrated that, contrary to what many biologists thought, evolution never comes to a stop, even in an unchanging environment.Let's talk about two issues in that paragraph.
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