Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!ucbvax!brahms!gsmith
From: gsmith@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Gene Ward Smith)
Newsgroups: net.sci,net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Contempt prior to investigation
Message-ID: <12212@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Thu, 6-Mar-86 20:17:16 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.12212
Posted: Thu Mar  6 20:17:16 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 8-Mar-86 05:09:09 EST
References: <899@decwrl.DEC.COM> <402@aoa.UUCP> <192@ulowell.UUCP> <954@lanl.ARPA> <208@ulowell.UUCP> <435@ccivax.UUCP> <166@epimass.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: gsmith@brahms.UUCP (Gene Ward Smith)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 37
Xref: watmath net.sci:563 net.philosophy:4363


    Joe: I liked your article. But I had a few quibbles.

In article <166@epimass.UUCP> jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) writes:

>>A round world.
>
>Religion, not science, suppressed these advances.  The truth on these
>questions was rediscovered many times, and the equivalent, at the time,
>of creationists burned the scientists at the stake.

     A round world was something the *educated* class (even more of a
minority then than now, of course) knew about in the middle ages. They
learned it where they learned so many other things: from their classical
authorities (such as Ptolemy). Remember the cosmography in Dante?


>>Even creationism has taken the form of genetic engineering and
>>bio-engineering technology.
>
>This is the biggest absurdity in your message.  People ignorant of evolution
>cannot do genetic engineering.  Creationists say that each species was
>created independently.  How could someone who believes this try to change
>one species into another?

     Considering all the other absurdities you quote, I wonder at you
calling this the worst. As far as I can see, the only reason a person
ignorant of evolution would have trouble doing bio-engineering is that
they would have long ago flunked out of school, and hence would never
have gotten the chance to learn the techniques involved.


ucbvax!brahms!gsmith    Gene Ward Smith/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720
"The *evident* character of this defective cognition of which mathematics
is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on
the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore
of a kind that philosophy must spurn." -- G. W. F. Hegel