Evolution Message Board - Msg: 29458644

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Evolution

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next

Recommended by:

2MAR$

To: Brumar89 who wrote (50837)	3/26/2014 12:35:36 PM
From: TigerPaw	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) of 69300

re you saying that Darwin predicted that continents had moved and the earth was older than the scientists of the day believed? No and Yes. Darwin did not expect continental drift. That work was not done until Darwin was gone. But he did postulate that a mechanism would be found which would have allowed life (such as dinosaurs) to have mingled in the past. He performed many experiments about ocean dispersal, that is how animals could fly or drift or otherwise cross the ocean. In the book "The Monkey's Voyage" by Alan DeQueiroz the author describes an exchange of letters between Darwin and other leading scientists of the day that large animals could have been transported on icebergs. He also believed that glaciation during the ice age opened land bridges between all the continents. The point is: He correctly determined that a mechanism would be found to explain how the animals of different continents in the past were able to breed, but he never learned the actual mechanism. The same thing is true about the age of the earth. Lord Kelvin, the leading thermodynamic expert of the day calculated that the Earth had cooled from a melted lava state while receiving sunshine. Taking all of this energy into account he determined that the Earth would have reached it's current temperature in about 100 million years. While this seemed like a long time to those who expected the Earth to be 6 thousand years old, it was a much shorter time than Darwin had expected for the amount of speciation observed on the planet. He referred to the geology work of Charles Lyell who calculated a much older earth. After Darwin's death it was discovered that radioactivity in the earth's core had kept it hotter than Kelvin's predictions from sunshine alone and that the earth was instead 4 1/2 billion years old. The power of Darwin's theory is that it predicts that eventually these specific assertions by the experts of his day would be shown to be wrong. He did not know exactly how his predictions would be shown to be correct, but he did correctly predict the important characteristics that the change to prevailing wisdom would contain. Within a score of years after his death the predictions were shown to be accurate.

Report TOU Violation

Share This Post

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next