
Jeremy England could change the way we think about evolution - wasi0013
http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/the-man-who-may-one-up-darwin/39217
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quadrangle
Click-bait title and framing. Article on someone interested in the definition
of life and questions about how life begins/began is interesting but isn't
about one-upping Darwin in any sense. I would _hate_ to be in England's shoes
where just being an intensely curious researcher gets journalists to
prophesize about you getting acknowledged as better than Darwin or whatever.
What a bunch of distraction to have to be humble and downplay that or to
defend the audacity etc. I bet lots of people will find it hard to avoid some
bias against England just to spite the careless and unjustified way the
journalist writes about him.

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juice_bus
The article pushed "Look! He is a Jew! and a scientist! its so incredible!
Sneakers!" way to hard.

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jonshariat
I've come to loath articles that stretch out a mildly interesting news and bio
into a long narrative that muddies the interesting part.

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azakai
Side note,

> Christianity and Darwinism are generally opposed

That's not fair to Christianity. For example, the largest Christian group, the
Catholic church, is in no way opposed to Darwinism
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution)

~~~
peteretep
As a committed atheist, I find people who try and create antagonism between
science and religion to be lazy.

If you're religious, and you think science squeezes out God, you're just
putting limitations on your all-powerful God by suggesting he's constrained by
the world He created.

If you're a scientist, you're missing the starting point that God's the guy
who (allegedly) programmed this world and so he's free to fudge whatever he
likes, and apparently so far he likes to simulate a measurable ruleset — he's
like a False on a proof tree, you can stick whatever you like under it.

~~~
alphapapa
I agree with everything you said. Curious, why are you a committed atheist?

~~~
jernfrost
Perhaps the question shouldn't be whether one believes God exists or not but
whether one thinks he is necessary to explain the world we see. I personally
don't believe in God, because I don't see the need for God to make sense of
the world. Also I don't really get why people mean by God, as he/she/it is
typically explained and defined in extremely vague terms to the point of being
utterly useless to a person with inclinations towards science and logic.

I would be very interested to hear how a man like England would have defined
or explained God.

~~~
alphapapa
> Perhaps the question shouldn't be whether one believes God exists or not but
> whether one thinks he is necessary to explain the world we see.

It's definitely a good question, but I don't think it's as important of a
question, because whether we think it's necessary for God to exist doesn't
have any bearing on whether God exists. If God exists, it is so regardless of
what we think.

Humans are finite, one might say "very finite" on the universal scale, so I
don't think it makes sense to expect humans to be able to even answer such a
question authoritatively. We get so many things wrong, and looking at human
history, humans have been getting things wrong for a long time. Now we have
science and computers and space programs, but on the universal scale, I think
we haven't begun to scratch the surface--and if that is so, how could we even
begin to answer the question of whether it's necessary for God to exist?

And there's always the question of what caused the universe to exist: whether
one believes it was a Big Bang or anything else, what caused that event? How
can we say whether it is necessary for God to exist to have caused it? What if
"God" is simply whatever caused the universe to come into existence? One may
not believe that the universe was created by God, but that leaves the question
of the universe's origin unanswered; and having no answer for that question,
it seems unreasonable to rule out the existence of God.

