> Unfortunately, you seem to misunderstand much.
Appearances may be deceiving.

> Prior to Darwin, the various
> races of mankind were often suggested to be separate species.
> In exact
> contradistinction to any form of racism, Darwin's arguments, and the
> explorations that they later fostered, obviated those notions.
Wasn't the full title of his book "The Origin of Species By Means of Natural
Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"?
Races, not race. Now, I have * not * so carefully read all of "The Descent
of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex", but I was able to find the
following quote online:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the
civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the
savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous
apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be
exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be
wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we
may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead
of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."
http://www.zoo.uib.no/classics/darwin/descent.chap6.html

> Nor is neo-Darwinism a rejection of Darwin's theses. In fact, it's
> just the opposite
> and is often called the "New Synthesis," a blending of
> Darwin's and Wallace's
> hypotheses on the mechanisms of selection, natural and
> sexual, and the
> then-newly emerging science of genetics of the 1940's.
I notice that you use the plural, theses, rather than thesis. Some of
Darwin's major points have been entirely rejected, others adjusted. The
latter is less remarkable than the former. And new questions are being
asked, whose very topics Darwin could not have imagined, such as genetics
and genomics (and google returns results for genemics; I will have to see if
its meaning follows on the analogy I would expect, where genemics is to
genetics what phonemics is to phonetics).

Whether, or more likely, when, Darwin will collapse the way Aristotle's
natural philosophy or "science" did, remains to be seen. Like the collapse
of Aristotle, that will only happen when a more comprehensive system comes
along to replace it, and then is popularly accepted by scientific and
educational communities. And like the collapse of Aristotle, it may take
some large amount of hard thinking to erode it to the point of collapse.
Before that happens, we may see a state rather like we see today for
Newtonian physics. Even though we know it's too flawed to use for astronomy
or quantum mechanics, it's still taught, because it's still useful for
engineering and the like. Paradigms shift, because ideas are only so
elastic. And when too many parts of an argument have to be discarded, the
argument fails.

Ironically, a classmate at my alma mater wrote his master's thesis in the
History of Science on the structure of Darwin's argument, which Darwin
described as "one long argument". My classmate used this phrase as the title
of his thesis, before Ernst Mayr's 1993 book with the same title.

But then, Alan Kay did state "Science itself is a stance in relationship to
knowledge. In order to do science, you have to give up the notion of truth.
... Science is a map that is always incomplete, and so it can always be
criticized and improved". Neo-Darwinism is much of modern biology, or at
least the map popularly used to organize the world we know. A lot of
important work goes into refining said map. But some of the breakthroughs
will come from those who figure out what important things are not even on
the map, which demand that the map be revised or entirely rewritten.

For a bit of infighting between Darwinian fundamentalism and pluralism, at
least according to its author, see
<http://www.stephenjaygould.org/reviews/gould_pluralism.html>.

> If you wish to read more about the evolution of the
> neo-Darwinism in a very few quotes, see:
> http://www.molevol.org/camel/projects/synthesis/new-synth-mut-quots.html

One of these days, I need to write on off-topic post on the informal and
incorrect use of "evolution" when applied to things subject to neither
random mutation nor natural selection, such as the idea(s) of neo-Darwinism.
While September 11th has effectively discouraged the building of buildings
significantly taller than those around them, I would not call this
evolution.

Nevertheless, the site given is worth taking the time to read, and to read
more slowly than I type. I'll probably review this with my oldest son, as
part of my contribution to his home education.

Still, it would be interesting to interview some number of randomly selected
graduates of an Ivy League school, and even allow them to self-select or
excuse themselves, based on their self-perception of scientific education,
and ask them, which drives evolution: mutation, natural selection, or both?

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
this can happen when one catches up on a week's worth of 3000-L

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