cool book

A web search strongly suggests he's an atheist, but I certainly couldn't say for absolute sure. (And since he seems to be willing to alter his views based on a chain of reasoning, he may have changed that one too.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(Who just got a copy for $6 on Alibris.)

I happen to like it. That sort of reasoning comes up a lot, especially on SED. There are a lot of very old guys posting here, and it takes effort to maintain mental flexibility as we age.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

But to really deny Darwin, he'd have to have an essay on the beaks of finches, wouldn't he?

Denial of some dude from centuries past is not an interesting subject; Rush Limbaugh did some denials on more modern subjects, but not to my taste.

Neo-Darwinism is barely 100 years old, and the theory got up-dated by Watson and Crick in 1953. It took another fifty years before we started sequencing enough genomes for that information to be helpful.

You don't have to be an idiotic fundamentalist to miss out on these developments, and not to understand what they mean, but the two states do coincide quite frequently.

John Larkin definitely isn't an idiotic fundamentalist - he's just gullible twit who will soak up any propaganda that is delivered with the level of flattery that makes him feel happy (which is to say, quite fulsome flattery).

He's very smart and has a sense of humor. Those are generally good signs.

Physical flexibility too. Did you see my x-ray?

Not quite what Crick was saying. The problem that Crick was addressing back then became less pressing as the role of RNA - and RNA-based enzymes - became better understood.

Or would be if, it somebody better informed than John Larkin thought that he was smart and had a sense of humour.

Some of them do seem to overdo it.

Being mentally flexible enough to be taken in by nonsense isn't any kind of virtue.

I know it is not what you mean, but it is the "intelligent design" creationist crowd who are the "fingers-in-the-ears" brigade. They have decided that abiogenesis and/or evolution "can't work". They do this on the basis of not listening to what the science says, or looking at the evidence, but on a blind belief in their pet idea of a creator god, magic DNA, or the absurd concept "there are things science doesn't know, therefore science doesn't know anything, therefore all ideas are equally valid".

Science, scientists, and people who view the world scientifically (even if they don't "do science" as a profession) are generally open-minded and ready for new ideas. But on the whole, we have a few more requirements than John Larkin likes - we require the idea to be scientifically based on evidence and rational explanation. Evolutionary biologists are regularly finding new ways for genes to be transferred, or new methods by which different genes are activated, or other non-genetic trait mechanisms. Abiogenesists are regularly finding new ways in which self-assembling complex molecules could build up from smaller molecules, or affect other reactions.

This is not something from two centuries ago - it is new, active science that is researched now and new results come up regularly.

The fundamentals of the theory of evolution, however, are old - even though the mechanisms that implemented it are being discovered and refined all the time. But those fundamentals are like arithmetic - they are clear, obvious (with hindsight!), inescapable, and justified through long-standing scientific methods of evidence, testing, and predictions. They are not up for grabs any more than "bricks fall when you drop them" is open to debate.

... or any one of the many many other forms of temple.

The nice thing about theological origin stories is that there are so many to choose from. If one is not to your liking, simply choose another.

Touche! :)

That's the key difference between growing up when we did and when our (grand)children grew up.

For us information was scarce, and obtaining it was difficult and time-consuming. The key skill was to get a source, then read and re-read it to extract as much as your could.

Nowadays we are drowning in "information", and the key skill is to quickly decide what to ignore.

That is an utterly unanswerable question.

The universe *by definition* means all that exists. It therefore cannot

If your universe contains a G*d, you still have the *exact* same problem. If on the other hand you claim that a G*d created your universe, then your definition of "universe" is wrong.

Clifford Heath

Quite a lot of "variant" pronunciations of swear words come from the Irish, whose bishops declared that swearing was a sin requiring confession, and who were pressed to enumerate the specific words.

So instead of "hell", the Irish invented "heck"... and many similar words.

Nice one.

CH

Speak for yourself. My parents were nuts about books, and had a lot of them, and I got access to the local library (using their library cards) very early on. I read a lot , and started getting critical fairly early.

I've never felt that I was drowning information. I've often felt that I was being exposed to more than I needed, but it is an environment in which I'm a competent swimmer.

Sorting out the less useful bits, and giving them no more weight than they deserve, is part of the process.

I never mentioned a church. Mr B didn't either. Why did you?

Mr B comes across as a well-read rambler, filling pages and pages with flowery prose and useless metaphor, contributing nothing of value himself. I can see how this can please a certain category of readers, but to me it looks like a waste of time.

Jeroen Belleman

Oh, but so did I!

One of my earliest memories is asking my father to teach me to read. He did. I read the first "Janet and John" book, half the second, and then moved onto conventional books. The family lore is that I could read the Guardian before I started going to school. I'm not sure that is true, and I'm certain I didn't understand everything! As seems to have escaped John, reading isn't comprehension.

Later on the local library staff somewhat sheepishly told my parents that I was using my junior card to get books from the adult library. Of course I was: juniors weren't fined for late return of books :)

But once I'd exhausted the local stock of whatever interested me, I had to get other books by inter-library loan. That took weeks, not least because often someone had to return the book first.

Much later, I got a store card for Heffers, and used to spend an afternoon browsing technical books. Never had any other store card!

I put information in quotes for a reason; think social mudia.

Fortunately my daughter seems to have worked out that some people are economical with the truth; she's pretty good at sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Yup, and doing that /fast/. Hence simply ignoring creationists operating under a false flag.

His statement is true, and is merely "cutting to the chase".