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xnimble@att.net 626-665-0000 2024 Laspanada St. L.A. CA 91026 re: Editorial 2/12/09 "Evolution's survival" (When the particles you're studying are capable of looking back up through the microscope and saying "we're not going to perform according to the rules you thought you had worked out yesterday." your discipline is a soft science. if, when judges, legislators and opinion leaders ask you for your opinion, instead of recusing yourself. you give an opinion based on your extrapolation of past increases in knowledge and which you hope will materialize " in a few years",...) For the sake of argument, define a religious belief as holding something as fact that you cannot prove. If the survival of evolution means that the proven and demonstrable facts of species variability, fossil record, etc. have not been suppressed, ok. But if a capital "E" is put on evolution by those who would use it to make school and police administrators, jurists, and legislators sheepish about considering anything but material values as applied to mechanical beings who are merely portions of a universe which is composed of nothing more than mega-quantities of incredibly tiny billiard balls whose bouncings since the big bang have created the world of today and all the behavior in it, well, whose science IS this that tells us that this is the final truth about the universe and should win with no debate over the religionist who also bases his recommendations to the powerful on beliefs he cannot prove. Maybe your malodorous skunk is a case of the Pot calling the Kettle Black. (Take, for example, all the doctors who prescribed Thalidomide.) The religious were making judgements based in inadequate or even incorrect data for thousands of years before there was even a pretense of scientific rigor. How do those who are so anxious about what philosophical approaches are taught to our children explain the human race having got to this lofty position of having some science to teach at all? You'd think the human race would be still grubbing for roots because we had no curriculum police to save us from our ignorance. |
journalist friend in the final composition of the submission Original Message: ----------------- From: nimble <xnimble@att.net Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:53:04 -0800 (PST) To: editor@garmentandcitizen.com Subject: LA Times letter needs help Ed, (Apologies if this crosses any unread emails.) If you don't mind, I solicit your opinion on what's wrong with this letter to the editor: Jack B. Nimble xnimble@att.net 626-665-0000 2024 Laspanada St. L.A. CA 91026 re: Editorial 2/12/09 "Evolution's survival" For the sake of argument, define a religious belief as holding something as fact that you cannot prove. If the survival of evolution means that the proven and demonstrable facts of species variability, fossil record, etc. have not been suppressed, ok. But if a capital "E" is put on evolution by those who would use it to make school and police administrators, jurists, and legislators sheepish about considering anything but material values as applied to mechanical beings who are merely portions of a universe which is composed of nothing more than mega-quantities of incredibly tiny billiard balls whose bouncings since the big bang have created the world of today and all the behavior in it, well, whose science IS this that tells us that this is the final truth about the universe and should win with no debate over the religionist who also bases his recommendations to the powerful on beliefs he cannot prove. |
--- On Fri, 2/13/09, editor@garmentandcitizen.com <editor@garmentandcitizen.com> wrote: From: editor@garmentandcitizen.com <editor@garmentandcitizen.com> Subject: RE: LA Times letter needs help To: jackbnimble@yahoo.com Date: Friday, February 13, 2009, 8:59 AM Jack, I think some of your letters can be difficult to understand because you love words--a bit too much for the purposes of succinct communication. Newspapers put a premium on brevity-- when possible--and clarity. I think this is what you are trying to say. A lot of our elected officials, school administrators and various other want to discount entirely the chance that the human race came from anything other than an evolutionary process. Many of the same eschew the idea that a God created mankind as a relic of religious beliefs as opposed to rational science. For the sake of argument, let's call a regligous belief as considering something to be true even if you cannot prove it. Putting an uppercase "E" on Evolution seems to be the same thing. Exactly what rational science has prove evolution to be a final and indisputable fact. Or is Evolution the new religion of officialdom? Take a look at that and use it as a base to recast your thoughts. I think you'll find that they ring more clear, Ed |
idea Thanks, Ed! I guess if these matters weren't difficult to express, the human game would be less interesting. If someone could calculate how to change the behavior of even one psychotic-- without killing neural tissue-- as easily as a physicist can tell you how many kilocalories were expended at Hiroshima, why, there'd be an egalitarianism of sciences that would make the psycho-sociological people absolutely snooty! I like your version except for two things: 1) I was trying to influence the officials to look at my thesis without putting them on the defensive, viz. your first and last sentences. 2) I thought the order of the exposition of the various concepts was, story-like, a build to a finale. (a build admittedly ruined by the vagueness of my "unprovenness" as well as the incredibly long sentence that nevertheless wouldn't easily reduce because it "told the story".) That said, I'll study your alterations very carefully. nimble |