Philip Bruce Heywood
Unregistered
|
Thanks, Anton, can you help with some monkey verse? I think you put a few extra words in NEW SCIENTIST's mouth, but people can check the original article.
Tom, you left out Sir Richard Owen's "Law of Progression from the General to the Particular"(1846,1851). Possibly the best reference to this evolutionary idea is John Reader, 1986. THE RISE OF LIFE. Collins, Grafton Street, London. You could of course cut corners by going direct to my site, but may prefer to consult a fully darwinist Evolutionist such as Reader. I quote him on the site. As far as I can discern - you may be able to improve on this - Owen's idea was that life was somehow pre-programmed to transform from one species to another. He made no claim to being able to discern how the transformations occurred, except to imply that the transformation event itself was pivotal and could not be the product of environmental pressures. I think he inclined to the definition of a species as a closed reproductive entity or the nearest estimate thereto - reproductive isolation of species. If we assume environmental pressure acted as a trigger or catalyst to transformation events, natural selection - Darwin - can in some sense be incorporated with Owen, and a composite theory meeting the factual requirements of species revelation follows. Owen's idea suddenly comes into vogue in the light of information technology and especially the DNA- quantum computation link. This same information technology opens the door to conjecture re. environment-relevant information incorporation by DNA at the point of transformation. The ultimate Source of the information is a private matter and presents no more of a hurdle to research than does the question of the Source of matter. Its storage and transmission are open to discovery and already show signs of being hot topics. All this and much more is of course addressed at my site. I value criticism and feedback.
The fact that the opinions of someone as prestigious as Richard Owen (not to mention a battery of others) are all but unknown to students in classrooms, scarcely commends some policies being pursued in science education. Well, at least there is something actually spproximating to free speech at TALKORIGINS. P.H..
|