David Clounch wrote:
Obviously biological evolution is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT in
meaning than
cosmological evolution. What irritates me is scientists and technical
people using the term evolution without the prefix adjective.
1. Do they do this because they are lazy?
2. Or is it because feel they can tell the prefix from context?
3. Or is it because they want obfuscation?
4. Or is it because they believe all types of evolution are part of a
grand philosophy?
Scientists are into accuracy and precision. If you do chemistry and
you don't pay attention to significant digits in your calculation you
will be and should be marked down on your papers. So why do we relax
this discipline for evolution? Shame!!! (my two cents worth).
The E-word is meaningless without an adjective.
David
My assumption is that you are pulling our collective legs? With email
or online it is often hard to tell when someone is using humor and
sarcasm or even when a position is being taken only for the sake of
argument, Smileys were invented to help communication in an online
environment.
If you are serious ;( then obviously I would argue for position 2 as
otherwise the number of adjectives to describe what each of us means by
evolution would become totally unwieldy. Certainly at times we need to
be very very clear about what we mean but not every time we use the
word on this list or in our professional lives. Is Gregory going to be
pedantically exact every time he uses the word Christian to describe
exactly what he means? Does he mean people who accept the asa
statement of faith, only the eastern Orthodox, the holy catholic church
of the apostles creed or what? :) In our church, at least, we have
catechisms that explain what we mean in the creeds and that is the
generally accepted use although often the meaning of a term is context
dependent even in our church environment. Even many computer languages
are context dependent and specialists in details of computer languages
can construct the most bizarre examples of legal language constructs
that no one in their right mind would intentionally use. I think most
people on this list are considerably smarter than dumb computers. :)
Also when one is living in a situation where the generally spoken
language is not ones own native language a tendency develops to want
all terms that could be controversial to be as precisely defined as
possible. Of course it is the words that one thinks are not
controversial that end up causing embarrassment. Having experienced it
I know that such a tendency to want precise definitions is likely to
annoy the surrounding native speakers who of course know what they
mean. The situation certainly also occurs in the reverse. The movie
'Dr Strangelove' was in theaters when we lived in Helsinki back in
1973. I certainly got tired of explaining that the plane pilot riding
a dropped
H-bomb to a certain death,
whooping and waving his cowboy hat, was black humor and did not
represent the typical citizen of the USofA. Similarly with Archie
Bunker as seen on Finish TV with subtitles resulted in huge areas of
misunderstanding. Landmines are everywhere in cross cultural
situations, that's why I think The Foreigner Series of science fiction
novels by C.J. Cherryh is so well written.
Dave W
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Received on Fri Oct 30 06:38:07 2009