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Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!donald
From: donald@utcsrgv.UUCP (Don Chan)
Newsgroups: net.news.group,net.physics,net.religion
Subject: Nay to net.origins
Message-ID: <2953@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 17-Dec-83 17:15:06 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.2953
Posted: Sat Dec 17 17:15:06 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Dec-83 17:31:10 EST
Organization: CSRG, University of Toronto
Lines: 48

I have mixed feelings towards net.origins.  While I'm a firm believer in
free intellectual discussion, I get the feeling that net.origins would
quickly degenerate into tirades on theories of biology by NONBIOLOGISTS.
In other words, a bunch of non-experts sounding off on topics they know
little about (sorta like net.politics :-)

The original suggestion by Paul Dubuc struck me as a thinly veiled attempt
to introduce "scientific" creationism on the net.  His true colors seem
to be revealed by the passage:
				       The firm logical and empirical
    support for much of what is presented as "established fact" in
    science education is crumbling--not necessarily at the hands of
    creationists.  Darwinism is, for all practical purposes, dead and
    neo-Darwinism seems to be following it.  I would like to know what
    is going to be replacing them since that does not seem to be common
    knowledge.  I refer to books like Norman Macbeth's "Darwin
    Retried", ...  and "The Neck of the Giraffe" by Francis Hitching.

The net is not the place to teach biology.
It's obvious where Paul's learned his though, judging from his remarks
about Darwinism.  Even Stephen Jay Gould wouldn't go that far, and he's
a real researcher in the field!  I read Hitching's book, expecting an
overview of the current controversy in biology on the mechanism of
evolution.  What I got was an fairly ignorant attack on straw men.

Forming your view of biological theories from mass-market books written
by non-professionals is not unlike gleaning knowledge on programming
language design from "101 BASIC programs for your PET" or learning
about aerospace engineering from "Flying Saucers have Landed".

The same goes for discussing evolution (lets call a spade a spade--
that's what'll be discussed in net.origins) on the net.

To be blunt, "scientific" creationism is pseudoscience, in much the
same way that Velikovsky's and Von Daniken's theories were
pseudoscience.  Is there a place for such stuff on the net?

On the whole then, I'd say it would be best to remain conservative and
nix net.origins.  Or failing that, perhaps rename the group to
net.pseudoscience so UFO fans can tell us all about how astronomers
and physicists are wrong, and that you can get from here to Tau Ceti IV
in less than 4 hours because their Vrondoovian friends that they
telepathically communicate with do it all the time using their
Scalar-Boson Space-drive.
-- 
Don Chan, University of Toronto Department of Computer Science
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