Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 21:00:07 -0700
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At 12:47 AM 11/09/96 -0400, SpkEnglish@aol.com wrote:
>
>When the French naturalist Lamarck announced that after extensive research,
>he discovered that after ten generations mice whose tails had been amputated
>still gave birth to mice with tails, one journalist commented: Any damned
>fool could have told him that in advance. The more we worship the kackamamie
>god of research, the more we lose our valuable instincts for common sense,
>creativity and self-empowerment.
Remember, wrong theories are simply stepping stones on the path of
scientific progress. Of course we know _now_ that mice won't stop growing
tails if you cut the tails off, but that knowledge isn't "self-evident."
If you had a hypothesis: "Environmental factors directly affect an animal's
progeny*" a good,controlled way to test it would be to chop tails off mice,
don't you think?
*no relation to Prodigy!
My point is, journalists are pretty loose with the phrase "damned fool."
Until Lamarck did that experiment, could any "damned fool" have offered
proof that he or she was right?
TTFN
travis
--
Travis Smith, Electronic Editor
Los Angeles Times, travis.smith@latimes.com
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