I shouldn't make light of readers who come here through google searches or otherwise happenstanceaically. Phron doesn't have enough readers. But someone googled their way here today via the search, "what years was evolution invented." This struck me as hilarious, but then it got me to thinkin'. Indeed, what years was evolution invented? Can't someone here among our erudite readers help out this poor high school student, forced to write a paper for Biology attacking evolution (or maybe searching for a job?)?
The fallback, of course, is simply to go to PZ Myers or Evolving Thoughts or finally read that Dennett tract. But, no, I want to do this myself. I'm a teacher, dammit, and I shan't allow the evolutionistas' ideas cloud my own pedagogical expertise on the subject of evolution, life, and bearded pixies. To be fair and balanced, I will also not go directly to the Discovery Institute website and cut and paste, as would normally be the case in such momentous scholarly research. Besides, I know the answer:
Billy, evolution was invented simultaneously in the years 1076 and 1243 by Ahmed the Pre-Cambrian Moor and Johannes Smartassiticus von Bayern-Munich.
4 comments:
Aristotle sketched out Empedocles’ theory and then answered it:
“Why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity? What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows. Similarly if a man's crop is spoiled on the threshing-floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this-in order that the crop might be spoiled-but that result just followed. Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity-the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food-since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose? Wherever then all the parts came about just what they would have been if they had come be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his 'man-faced ox-progeny' did.
This is a pretty close shot at evolution from Aristotle. So I would argue for the Pre-socratics generally.
Thomas
Thomas
Nice job, Thomas. I had seen that before, from the Physics. I looked it up now, and found I had at some point written in the margins, "contra A's teleology?"
The contributions of Smartassiticus von Bayern-Munich are grossly overrated. He simply translated Ahmed's work from the original Moorish into Gaelic, and then from Gaelic into German, and then from German into Latin, passing off the bastardized result as his own. While this process anticipated babelfish.com by some 750 years, it gives him no claim to inventing evolution, in whichever years he did it.
For a more complete analysis of this controversy, see Anderson, J., Howe, S., Squire, C, Wakeman, R., and White, A., “Folklore and Folkways Concerning Surface Irregularities in Inter-continental Aqueous Bodies," Records of Atlantic Nature, vol. 80001 (1974).
Roxtar -
You're close to the edge of truth on that one, but I think you remain an owner of a lonely heart on this issue. The topographic oceans thesis is a mere tale (albeit accomplished with great pomp and fanfare). Although Smartassiticus also claimed - dubiously so, I must say - to have revealed the science of God, I do believe his understanding of Gaelic to be a complete lie. No matter the size of his laughably gigantic organs, one cannot elide this fact. The question remains: are we all God's children or animals in the zoo?
Post a Comment