The Barbarian, on the idea that natural selection was Darwins "big idea":
One of them. Ernst Mayr, in "Toward a New Philosophy of biology" points out that Darwin's theory reas really five theories.
According to Mayr, Darwin didn't even know the meaning of "species", so I don't think there's much mileage in trying to suggest that Mayr was a champion of Darwin's scientific skills.
"IT was Darwin who introduced this new way of thinking into science. His basic insight was that the living world consists not of invariable essences (Platonic classes), but of highly variable populations...He realized that neither transmutationism nor transformationism nor any other theory based on essentialism would do. And he was right.
Ernst Mayr,
What Evolution Is Basic Books 2001 pp. 84-85
Perhaps you should read something by Mayr. It's very clear that you have not.
Anyway, what Mayr made of Darwin's ideas is by no means necessarily what Darwin made of them.
Mayr was considered to be one of the people most knowledgable of Darwin's theory.
"Fact" - Darwin probably (IMO) "borrowed" the idea of natural selection from someone else
The nature of science is to build on the ideas of others. Darwin and Wallace are honored because they figured out how it works.
Through plagiarism - taking someone else's ideas and pretending that no one had ever thought of evolution before he (Darwin) came along?
Perhaps you don't understand what "plagarism" means. Read the book I cited to learn why Darwin and Wallace were given credit.
Darwin and Wallace did NOT figure out how it works, which is why Darwinism has been quietly abandoned. Gregor Mendel figured out "how it works". Darwin hadn't a clue - and Wallace knew even less.
Darwin's analysis of how it works:
1. More are born than can live
2. A organisms vary to some degree from their parents
3. Some variation makes an organism more likely to survive and reproduce
4. These variations tend to increase in the population
5. These accumulate and eventually form new species.
Which is what we observe.
They were honoured - Darwin far more than Wallace - because his writings provided justification for the excessive wealth of the small upper class and the grinding poverty of the huge under class; and because it justified the way we ruled and mercilessly exploited our empire.
You've been misled on that. Neither Darwin nor Wallace considered nature to be a source of human values. Darwin specifically denounced such thinking.
It might the rich and good could sleep easy knowing that nature/God had ordauined their high estate.
Since supposedly Christian ministers had preached that long before Darwin, one supposes you are right.
Fact" - The value of Darwin's original work was that it showed how natural selection could support indefinite radiation
Some of it.
I suggest not. "Natural selection", many scentists (e.g. Prof. Brian Goodwin) now acknowledge, is adequate to explain adaptation (microevolution) but NOT evolution (macroevolution).
I happen to be a fan of D'Arcy Thompson, and his thoughts on how physics and physical forces shape organisms as well as genes do. Goodwin has that understanding:
"The small-scale variation and the detailed adaptation of organisms to their habitats are very well explained by neo- Darwinism, but the global problem, the large-scale evolutionary problem, is unsolved. How do you get evolutionary novelty? Emergent order? The difference between squids and fishes and penguins. That's what the science of complexity is beginning to address  to demonstrate how emergent qualities can develop out of complexity, so that you get the emergence of order. The difficulty is making the theoretical work connect with the biological evidence. Most of the modeling currently done on computers is still very abstract, and there's not a lot of detailed evidence as to how that translates into what actually goes on in organisms."
http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/k-Ch.4.html
However, the revelations of evo-devo and the homiotic genes that work the same in vertebrates and insects has shown that Darwinism is indeed the correct understanding. It's just that the organism is a complex interaction between itself and the environment.
Stephen Gould on Brian Goodwin:
"Brian's main commitment, contrary to the norm in twentieth-century England, is to represent one of these great traditions of Western thought, structuralism in biology, which is a nonselectionist, nonhistoricist view. It's basically the argument that laws of form and structure of matter constrain very much how organisms are built, and therefore the main features of organic design are neither necessarily specific adaptations built by selection (which is functionalism, the opposite view) nor are they historical contingencies (as I would argue in many cases) but they are representations of inherent natural patterns.
The major statement of that line of thought in English writing is D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form. It's a grand tradition. I don't accept it to the extent that Brian does, because of my own commitment to historical contingency. But I'm very interested in structuralism. It's a way of thinking about form which works in many cases. It's another way of critiquing the pure functionalism of the adaptationist program."
We've already seen new species evolve. Reality trumps anyone's academic musings.
Funnily enough they'd reached much the same conclusion in the 1920s - then Sewell Wright, et al came up with the "modern synthesis" and saved evolution, but not Darwinism.
Properly, is called NeoDarwinism or the modern synthesis. Natural selection remains.
"Fact" - In The Origin of Species Darwin gives copious *anecdotal* evidence that without outside interference (e.g. human breeders) the effect of natural selection is to conserve the status quo rather than promoting variation
Barbarian observes:
Some of it. Other parts of the evidence show how selection can change species.
That's precisely what I mean - there's no evidence for any significant change.
You don't seem to mean that at all. Do you understand how Darwinian theory predicts stasis in some cases, and rapid change in others?
"Fact" - Science is about facts, not emotions
"Fact" - Fat chance! Evolution is an area of academia renowned for the "passion" (to put it nicely) of the protagonists in the various bouts of infighting. Check out The Darwin Wars, by Alan Brown, for example
Barbarian observes:
Science is a passionate undertaking. Nevertheless, evidence always takes the prize, even if it takes a while.
Evidence. Without it, no theory lasts for long.
"Fact" - A "fact" is the prevailing interpretation of the "evidence". "Evidence" is "out there", "interpretations" are in the heads of the perceivers of the evidence and tend to be somewhat transitory. A single, broken tooth was "evidence" - the idea that this demonstrated the existence of a creature ancestral to modern humans who had crossed from Asia into North America - "Nebraska Man" - was an interpretation.
Barbarian observes:
It was for the newspaper that published the report. However, when a paleontologist familiar with mammals got a look at it, he quickly determined that it was from a javalina. Facts.
Or "pecary", as I think many people will know it.
Here you are, I'm afraid, sadly astray.
Nope. But let's take a look.
It was Henry Fairfield Osborne, head of the American Museum of Natural History, who invented Nebraska Man, and he quite specifically gave the description I referred to as late as June 1925, YEARS after the first tooth was found. The only thing you can blame on the newspapers is the illustration of Nebraska Man that was not, as far as I know, sanctioned by Osborn or any of his staff.
You've confused Osborne with the scientist who debunked the newspaper account, as well as Osborne's opinion (Osborne was not a mammal expert, and was fooled by the fact that the tooth was worn to closely resemble a human tooth)
Once a paleontologist familiar with mammals saw it, he quickly resolved the controlversy. As I said, the evidence is what counts, as it did this time.
Darwin collected "evidence" like crazy - though ironically he had little or no idea what it "meant".
Barbarian observes:
In fact, he showed very clearly what it meant. So clearly, he revolutionized biology.
Nope. It wasn't just evolution. Darwin was the one who investigated and explained the origin of coral atolls and who clarified the classification of barnacles. His extensive work on barnacles (which he correctly classified as arthropods, not mollusks as formerly thought) is the foundation of modern studies of barnacles.
He also had an exhaustive understanding of all sorts of organisms. It was this encyclopedic knowledge of living things that made it possible for him to write his book.
By the way, we could avoid most of this banter if you cared to examine the contents of my websites. Details of the Nebraska Man business are on the Scopes Trial site; Darwin's lack of scientific expertise is catalogued on the Charles Darwin site. Since you clearly know next to nothing about the "evidence" regarding Darwin's life and work - as demonstrated in these answers and in your misguided *suggestion* that Darwin suffered from Chagas' Disease - you might find it interesting, or even useful.
You're learning a lot of new things, and some of it contradicts what you were taught. Don't get mad, get smart. Go and learn about it. I only spend time on creationist websites when I have a reasonable expectation of seeing something new. So far, everything you've told me is recycled from other websites.
The symptoms of Chaga's disease are often manifested as they were in Darwin. We know Darwin was exposed, and we know he appeared to have the disease.
Barbarian observes:
Common descent, modes of speciation. Things like that. Would you like to learn about some of it?
Common descent - that wouldn't be anything to do with Haeckel's discredited drawings, or the failed "science" of homology, would it?
Nope. That's been dead since Von Baer (a Darwinist) discredited Haeckel's theory of recapitulation.
As for "modes of speciation" I have no argument with speciation so I don't need convincing, ta.
So how far do you think variation in speciation goes? The "scientific creationsts think it goes to new genera and new familes. Is that about right?
And in any case, all you are doing is listing the "evidence". It says nothing about how evidence might be "interpreted".
I've heard the "there are no absolutes" stuff a lot. But I don't buy it. Sorry.
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