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Author Topic:   Why Only Creationism So Politicized?
sfs
Member (Idle past 2555 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 77 of 155 (70980)
12-04-2003 11:56 AM
Reply to: Message 72 by Syamsu
12-04-2003 8:26 AM


Re: Engineering special: take whatever it has at that point.
quote:
Has any other evolutionist/darwinist ever heared of these supposedly infuential papers Mammuthus referenced? No? Would anyone offer the same papers as influential as Mammuthus did? No?
Of course I've heard of them -- anyone who does any work on recent human evolution knows about them. I just cited one of them in a review paper, in fact. And yes, I'd include both of them in a list of influential papers about human evolution, at least.
quote:
A paper dealing with a single species, human beings, would not likely be regarded as influential IMO, unless it dealt with the one species as an example of how all or many species evolve. For instance one might regard the paper on white/black moths as influential, but then I don't think that paper (or was it published as a novella?) is regarded that way much anymore.
A paper on a single species has the potential to be considered influential if it is one of the handful of species whose evolution has been studied intensively, or if it is about a species we happen to be particularly interested in. Papers about humans qualify on both counts.
quote:
I think this would be different when I asked the same sort of questions on a chemics or physics forum.
I can't think of any physics papers in the last 50 years that would be on every physicist's list of influential papers -- what's important varies too much by discipline. Physics is more specialized than biology, by a fair bit. But I'm not sure what you meant by that remark -- what did you mean, anyway?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 72 by Syamsu, posted 12-04-2003 8:26 AM Syamsu has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 78 by Syamsu, posted 12-04-2003 7:12 PM sfs has replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2555 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 82 of 155 (71079)
12-04-2003 10:37 PM
Reply to: Message 78 by Syamsu
12-04-2003 7:12 PM


quote:
I meant that unlike in other sciences such as physics or chemistry, evolutionism / darwinism is mainly advanced in prosaic books, which books tend to have much political or religious meandering in them.
The only problem with your statement is that it's utterly wrong. I see no difference between physics and evolutionary biology in their use of papers. Neither uses books for actual scientific work to any significant extent.
quote:
Such a paper you refer to might loosely be regarded as influential, but it's not like you're going to put them in a college learning course about the most important works in evolutionism / darwinism. Such a course would only consist of books, would contain no paper at all I guess.
Since you evidently know nothing at all about the subject, why on earth are you offering a guess here? It's in fact much easier to put together a college course on evolution that's based primarily on papers than it is to put together a similar course on just about any field in physics; research papers in evolution can be understood with much less background than physics papers. I wouldn't hesitate to put both of the papers in question into a college course; they would be entirely appropriate in a course on human evolution. In practice most college courses in either subject use textbooks as their main source, at least for lower-level classes, but upper-level college and graduate courses in evolutionary biology should be using research papers as part of their material -- there's no other way of keeping up to date. Physics courses, on the other hand, use primarily textbooks even at the graduate level. And neither physics nor biology uses the kind of popular book you're talking about, at least not for anything besides general interest courses for non-science majors.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 78 by Syamsu, posted 12-04-2003 7:12 PM Syamsu has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 84 by Syamsu, posted 12-04-2003 11:25 PM sfs has not replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2555 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 98 of 155 (71546)
12-08-2003 8:54 AM
Reply to: Message 96 by lpetrich
12-06-2003 8:22 PM


quote:
Just follow this link and you'll find it: http://www.pubmed.org
It won't bite, and it won't eat up a lot of your time.
Unless he starts reading the papers -- a search on "molecular evolution" turns up 15,000 papers, for instance. There doesn't seem to be much risk of that happening, however.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 96 by lpetrich, posted 12-06-2003 8:22 PM lpetrich has not replied

  
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