User talk:Bmazreen

Soapboxing removed. Wikipedia talk pages are for communications between editors on matters concerning the encyclopaedia. They are not for promoting one's point of view. Peridon (talk) 18:53, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Holy writ

The trouble with a lot of people who attack evolution from a religious point of view is that they take Origin of Species to be Holy Writ on the scientific side, just as the Bible and Koran are on their respective sides. It isn't. Virtually all the scientific supporters of the Theory will agree that Darwin's mechanism is flawed. And there have been improvements and revisions ever since. The 'survival of the fittest' idea wasn't Darwin's, but came from an early supporter. As Darwin couldn't think of anything better, he acceded to it. The current position is (more or less) 'what can survive will' coupled with 'what can breed will'. A peacock with a six inch long tail can survive, but if all the local peahens turn down his advances, he won't breed. (In fact, in the jungles where they originated, a six inch tail is more practical. A peacock with a ten foot tail might be a wow with the ladies, but is very likely to be eaten before he gets old enough to be interested.)

Another problem is the word Theory. This is a scientific term with a different slant to the everyday one. A scientific idea will start as a hypothesis, which means one or two people have decided that it's the way things work. When a sufficient number have investigated it, and agreed with it experimentally and/or by deep research, it will progress to being a theory. Only when irrefutable proof by the standards of the day has shown that no way can it be wrong does it become a law. And even then, it is still subject to checking against new researches as techniques and knowledge improve.

Which is begging the question of promoting ideas on Wikipedia. This isn't permitted, so I would advise not adding your ideas to any articles without starting a discussion on the relevant talk page first to get the consensus view. Peridon (talk) 12:09, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

"some bears going into water to find food transformed themselves into whales over time" - yes, he did say that sort of thing. Mendel wasn't 100% right, either. Now we know better how it works. Genetic change is an ongoing process. Sometimes a minor change is lethal - it won't be born. Sometimes it makes no difference. Other times it may improve the chances of survival by allowing a new food source to be exploited, or a different temperature range to be tolerated. Scientific thought is an ongoing process too. It's a form of evolution in which some ideas survive for many years, some change rapidly, others die off. Peridon (talk) 12:50, 3 December 2010 (UTC)