The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > Darwin: evidence is everything > Comments

Darwin: evidence is everything : Comments

By Mark S. Lawson, published 18/2/2009

Freud, Marx and Darwin - three great scholars: but only one could provide evidence for his theories.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. Page 4
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. 8
  10. All
Since when have you ever listened to Professors, runner?
Posted by Bugsy, Thursday, 19 February 2009 3:40:45 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Curmudgeon,

That comes of my relying on a former colleague's lectures--against my own principles.

However, the following two quotations from the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy bear on your comment.

'The radical revision of the Principia became abandoned by 1693, during the middle of which Newton suffered, by his own testimony, what in more recent times would be called a nervous breakdown. In the two years following his recovery that autumn, he continued his experiments in chymistry [sic] and he put substantial effort into trying to refine and extend the gravity-based theory of the lunar orbit in the Principia, but with less success than he had hoped....'

'Several of the loose-ends were successfully resolved during the 1740's through such notable advances beyond the Principia as Clairaut's Théorie de la Figure de la Terre; the return of the expedition from Peru; d'Alembert's 1749 rigid-body solution for the wobble of the Earth that produces the precession of the equinoxes; Clairaut's 1749 resolution of the factor of 2 discrepancy between theory and observation in the mean motion of the lunar apogee, glossed over by Newton but emphasized by Machin; and the prize-winning first ever successful description of the motion of the Moon by Tobias Mayer in 1753, based on a theory of this motion derived from gravity by Euler in the early 1750s taking advantage of Clairaut's solution for the mean motion of the apogee.'

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sub Newton.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton/

I take it that that means that Newton was aware of a problem, tried and failed to solve it, but held on to his theory. And rightly.
Posted by ozbib, Thursday, 19 February 2009 5:14:01 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Interesting claims, runner. Particularly when they come from someone who had to cut-and-run from another thread because they couldn't back some similar assertions with anything credible.
Posted by AdamD, Thursday, 19 February 2009 5:37:00 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Runner,
Religion is a fairy tale for adults. Evolution is a theory based on physical evidence, and for the record, Mother Teresa actually didn't do much for humanity.

She did put bandages on the poor but never once tried to address the cause of their poverty. Her order accumulated lots of money but little of it found its way to the poor.

Maybe she was thinking about what Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara said -

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a Saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist."

She must have decided to play it safe.
Posted by wobbles, Friday, 20 February 2009 12:46:48 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
"If evidence is everything then Darwin's theory of natural selection is fundamentally flawed"

For some people the only evidence that would suffice is a booming voice from heaven.

Of course, the evidence for both the evolutionary process (eg the fossil record) and Darwin's theories (eg selective breeding, simple observation) is compelling. But it requires an open mind.
Posted by Greig, Friday, 20 February 2009 6:18:18 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
It would be quite conclusive to assume that is the problem Grieg, people’s observations and looking at things through a metaphysician’s eye that allows their own Solipsism to overlook the scientific measurement, and allow dysfunctional opinions and mantra as evidence of the existence of objectives.
People’s minds are opened that wide, it is obvious their brains have fall out .
Posted by All-, Friday, 20 February 2009 10:46:42 AM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. Page 4
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. 8
  10. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy