Boycott Fox? You've got to be kidding.
POSTED BY: Thrawn
UPDATED: Friday, April 9, 2004 13:37
VIEWED: 16792
PAGE 8 of 8
I really can't understand how anybody tolerates broadcast television to begin with. It's patently offensive by its very nature. The fact that a few quality programs manage to squeeze out through the cracks is hardly justification. More and more people seem to agree and are moving toward alternatives that don't treat the viewers like ignorant cattle. Just let it die.
SergeantX
"..and here's to all the dreamers, may our open hearts find rest." -- Nanci Griffith
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i don't think you can exactly call it a boycott but we don't watch fox. they don't have anything we want to see. wonderfalls was the first thing they had that interested us in a very long time.
"They say the snow on the roof is too heavy. They say the ceiling will cave in. His brains are in terrible danger."
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Quote:
In short, there is no fossil record of the slow change of one species into another.
Ok, way off topic here, but:
Punctuated equilibrium, depending on its interpretation, is either wrong (major change happens overnight, or in a generation or 2), or a no-brainer (change can happen over several thousand years). The difference between what Darwin said and what Gould said is in their different definitions of the word "slow." Darwin interpreted it the way most people do: if it happens over 1000 generations, in increments so small that they can't be measured from one generation to the next, that counts as slow. To a paleontologist, that's immeasurably fast.
Also, the fossil record can't possibly show that there's "no change" for long periods of time. It can show "no gross skeletal morphological change, at least among a portion of a species", but that's a far cry from "no change." Never mind that Darwin never said there would be slow, steady change; he said that change happened in response to selection pressures. If there's no selection pressure against a certain morphological shape for a couple hundred thousand years, there won't be evidence of change in the fossil record. In the meantime, there will be no evidence left of changes in diet, behavior, coloring, and major biochemical change, rendering 2 organisms from the same "species" (according to paleontologists, based on shape) entirely unable to reproduce with each other given adequate time travel or frozen embryos.
There's a whole lot more to evolutionary theory and study than what's in the fossil record, and even more to it than natural selection ("what Darwin said"), which is still the only explanation for things that appear to have been designed.
[edited to fix a sentence fragment.]
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The next time FOX buys a Firefly or Wonderfalls? They will cancel it after a few episodes and replace it with filth like the Swan. When a store regularly provides me with bad service or a company continually produces a defective product I stop patronizing them. Granted with television it is more indirect as I don't pay for FOX, the advertisers do. I am boycotting the advertisers who support FOX. If they want to reach me with their commercials they are going to have to do so elsewhere.
While it would be much more cathartic to lopp off a few executive heads and mount them on pikes outside the corporate headquarters, I think my decision to say 3 strikes and your out FOX is reasonable and doesn't lead me to any fire and brimstone.
I am not trying to change their minds or habits, I am simply saying good riddance to bad customer service and a refusal to buy defective products like dwarfsploitation and gold-digging spouse hunts.
Arawaen
Um, I'm lost. Uh, I'm Angry. And I'm Armed.
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FireflyTheMovie:
Nice answer and well thought out.
But there is no denying the "staccato" burst of -- as yet -- inexplicable emergence of new species. Certainly, while Darwinism appeals to the logic, it's more closely akin to Kipling's "Just So Stories" ( http://www.sff.net/people/karawynn/justso/leopard.htp) than to the evidence, as represented in the fossil record. It's misleading to speak of speciation here; it's well known that a single species divided, can over time become speciated, i.e., unable to reproduce and provide viable offspring. (BTW, to any fatheads who believe that Blacks and Caucasians are of differing species, put that in your pipe and smoke it)
Punctuated equilibrium (PE) attempts to address the gross morphological changes the fossil record displays and which Darwin got wrong. He held that a marmot slowly changed -- climbed the evolutionary tree -- into a man. 'taint so... Furthermore, if PE is correct, they still haven't figured out the how. But I suspect science will one day get it figured out.
For further reading into one possible how, I recommend "How the Leopard Changed Its Spots : The Evolution of Complexity" by Brian Goodwin. A synopsis of the book may be found at http://tinyurl.com/2pkao
Here's a very brief reviewer's excerpt:
"Do genes explain life? Can advances in evolutionary and molecular biology account for what we look like, how we behave, and why we die? In this powerful intervention into current biological thinking, Brian Goodwin argues that such genetic reductionism has important limits.
Drawing on the sciences of complexity, the author shows how an understanding of the self-organizing patterns of networks is necessary for making sense of nature. Genes are important, but only as part of a process constrained by environment, physical laws, and the universal tendencies of complex adaptive systems. In a new preface for this edition, Goodwin reflects on the advances in both genetics and the sciences of complexity since the book's original publication."
For everyone: Don't take me as a source. Read what the folks on the cutting edge are thinking. Then read some differing viewpoints, including those that disagree with how you feel. Then make up your mind, and be prepared to do a one-eighty as new evidence arises. That's the scientific method...
Respectfully,
zoid
_________________________________________________
"River didn't fix faith. Faith fixed River."
- Senator Richard 'Book' Wilkins, Independent Congress
author of A Child Shall Lead Them: A History of the Second War of Independence
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Zoid-
The major difference between Darwin's main point and "Just-so" stories (which he certainly came up with, and got wrong in many cases, along with a lot of other details, especially considering that there was no known mechanism for heritability of traits) is that Darwin's main point was that outside selection pressures shape species so that they appear to be designed for a purpose. As I stated above, the "staccato" changes and speciation are entirely consistent with natural selection, because "staccato" to a paleontologist is tens of thousands of years. Is natural selection the only source of change? No. Was Darwin's theory anywhere near complete? Not at all.
If we're talking about sudden speciation across many species all "at the same time" (from a paleontological point of view, anyway) that generally coincides with some kind of major climate-changing even, evidence of which can also be found in the geological record. If we're talking about a single instance of speciation, you wouldn't expect a record of that to be found in the geoligical record.
Does Darwin's theory explain the "staccato" effects you're talking about? No. (Keeping in mind that "explain" and "be consistent with" are two entirely different things. And that "staccato" is just another word for "fast", which has just as many problems as "slow".) Does punctuated equilibrium? No. It's more of a description than an explanation. Is there any evidence that punctuated equilibrium exists in a biological sense, rather than just a paleontological sense? Not really. Is there evidence that natural selection exists in a biological sense? Tons. Ask any epidemiologist.
Quote:
He held that a marmot slowly changed -- climbed the evolutionary tree -- into a man.
There's that word "slow" again. And Darwin never said that a marmot turned into a man. A marmot is an animal that exists today. He held that marmots and humans had a common ancestor (which the fossil record indicates bore more resemblance to a marmot than to a man, morpholigically speaking). Over time, that ancestor speciated, etc., etc., but he never said anything about a constant rate of change.
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