OT: What the heck do they teach in college??

visited the

passport

'n-i-t-e'."

and she probably spells relief as r-o-l-a-i-d-s.

verbal

like the ones here who think we live in dolphin county.

I grew up about 25mi south of Paxton and never had a patatoe or tomatoe. I've had lotsa potatoes and tomatoes, though.

Since they 'oe' spelling isn't even listed as archaic, I doubt your "teacher's" story.

Where was that? I have tried to make clear that my religion does not involve "how we got here" and in fact is not related to anything beyond the strictly spiritual. It is a fallacy that I have persistently tried to dispel that intelligent design and creation theories are necessarily religious. As I have stated many times here, the source of the sudden capacity for abstract thought is not known and possibly can not be known.

The erroneous presumption that creation = fundamental Chritianity is one that causes a great deal of trouble.

Mike

The main reason to put that possibility on a back burner is the suddenness of the appearance of abstract thought. If it had emerged over 30 million years rather than 30 thousand, I would definitely think your explanation was the more likely.

My arguments don't address a source of the universe - that really is a different matter entirely - but address how mankind came to be what it is: a new dimension of intelligence.

Mike

Hoo, boy! That would take on a life of its own!

I am fascinated that a century ago we could sum up the mechanics of the universe in a (large) handful of Newtonian formulas and equations. With the advent of relativistic mechanics and their spectacular success in predicting anomalies in celestial behavior there was some head scratching. Quantum mechanics really made a mess of things, so we need Superstring Theory (which in turn uses Grassman number systems; systems that are merely consistent without being applicable to reality) just to make our 4 dimensional universe fit into 10-dimensional model. The simplest explanation at this point is that the universe itself is impossible. But that isn't an attractive option.

Mike

Why wait? Hit him NOW!

I'd hypothesize an attempt to lend credibility to Dan Quayle, but a Google seems to show it *is* a pretty common error, and Dan's screwup too new. Musta just been a moron teacher. I've had a couple, and know some now. Sadly. Kids (and their parents) need to challenge stupid/ignorant/misinformed teachers. But they need to do so in a private, non-confrontational manner. Unless there's no other way.

Given the gaps in the history, I'm not so sure we're all that sure it happened in 30k. Perhaps we just don't know about the evidence, or perhaps it really happened that fast. Evolutionary "leaps" happen.

AFAIK, Darwin never addressed creation of anything but species. Not life, not humanity. But it seems to be a logical extension. By the way, Darwin had a theory; ID/Creationism are at best hypotheses.

Well, that's part of the fun in it, isn't it?

Ever seen the movie "Waking Life"? Might appeal to you...

You're loosing me on the details here. Always sort of sucked in physics...

Well, personally, I'm quite happy living in an impossible place. Doesn't bother me at all ;)

TomB

Sure Mike's theory leaves open the possibility of a god. It also leaves open the possibility of multiple gods, or aliens, or even... mice. That no more makes it a "religeous" theory than it does an X-Files theory.

My 30K time frame is based on the earliest indication of abstract thought we've found, cave paintings in France. Given that we may not have found the earliest ones done yet - and that the very earliest may well have been done with charcoal or animal blood and have vanished over time - the actual beginning may have been as much as 100K years ago. Maybe the caves with the earliest painitngs are full of Iraqi WMDs ;-)

A bigger objection is the absence of any clear mechanism for the development of abstract thought, particularly to the extent we are capable of it. Natural selection works on the basis of greater adaptability based on inheritable characteristics, and nothing associated with abstract thought appears to have a significant inheritable component. Certainly the effect is not so pronounced that abstract thinkers would have entirely supplanted the non-thinkers in 3000 generations, or in 10,000. (Insert your own wry comment about whether non-thinkers are gone.)

There are two central questions: (1) did something happen in the last 100K years or less that fed the rise of abstract thought, and with it agrarian societies, writing and art? If the answer is "no" you are excused from the second question. (2) If so, what could have been the nature of that change; the form of the change rather than the putative source of the change?

I agree with you on that. Darwin's work was good, solid stuff and not at all as controversial as the extrapolations that followed. Really, the problems with the extrapolations didn't/don't stem from the theories but from the unwarranted enthusiasm for the farthest extensions. I don't even have a problem with the theory that hominids were the evolutionary result of a spark of life (my guess: one surviving spark) eons ago, or even that the original spark(s) was/were the result of natural albeit rare chemical processes - even though those too are hypotheses, as you describe. My big problem is the jump from evolved hominids to mankind.

Mike

Maybe that's the source of the confusion - whether the plural is made by adding "s" or "es." One of my Spanish teachers taught us there is no such thing as a "tamale", that the singular of "tamales" is "tamal."

In a similar vein, "avocado" and "chipotle" are European adaptations of the Nahuatl words "avocatl" and "chipotl" because we seem to have problems ending words with "tl."

Mike

1. If Mike's "theory" is that which ID puts forth, then it has to be an "intelligent" entity that originated (x, y, z) on earth etc.
2. If what Mike says proposes no particular cause behind a certain phenomenon, then it's not a "theory" in the scientifc sense.
3. If one possibility left open for explaing life's origins is "gods" then of course this is religion about which we're talking.

The language is important. So are strong deductive reasoning skills; we couldn't be having a rational conversation without them.

The trick sometimes is identifying those that do not have strong deductive reasoning skills. Until one does, one will waste a lot of time talking nonsense. Plus, of course the person lacking deductive reasoning skill can't really follow proofs. S/he'll seize on some part of an argument and not look at the entire argument. A part of an argument is not thee full argument yada.

alternatives.

tomatoe.

that would be potatoe.

maybe she grew up somewhere else.

well i remember it because the "e" is silent, and that was her way of making us remember to put it on there. and it wasn't plural. she said that not using the "e" was a colloquial (informal) spelling and would not be considered correct in her class. that was the first time i heard that word, as well.

and wasn't he from il or in?

No - we can't say that. We can only say what should be the most common scientific response, "we don't know."

I won't argue that.

That one I will argue. The theory of evolution still leaves open the possibility of "gods" as does almost any theory. They also leave open the possibility of the "Chariot of the Gods" theory (hey - that one does qualify as a theory). Religion is here only if you insist on bringing it in.

Science rarely offers proofs. If there were a proof, it would be a theorem, not a theory. You are right that it requires deduction to arrive at a proof, but under the rules of deduction the theorem is the result of the proof - theories are not allowed. Theorems are invariably as dull as rice cakes.

Induction is used for virtually everything in the real world - court battles, accident and incident investigations, even safety analyses. Every analysis I have ever seen or done relies on probabilities: what is the way to bet? The one my manager most appreciated was one of the loosest; measuring system availability after one of our biggest facilities lost all power (don't ask!). One dimension had the impact of traffic on our system bracketed between 30% and 50%, but the precisions of the time dimension coupled with the marginal nature of the outage we were measuring kept the uncertainty of our system availability to within a few tenths of a point. My estimate was the only one any of us could come up with - everybody else was trying to count trees rather than measure the forest. Loose as it was, that report has become a model for our current availability reporting.

The world also has fewer certainties than it did even a half century ago, as a result of probability theory extended from quantum theory. There is even a piece of equipment in production that uses "impossible" (now only "ridiculously improbable") action: the Tunneling Electron Microscope. There is also serious research into faster-than-light communications based on quantum tunneling - only microwaves that can penetrate a thick metal block are used!

Mike