Wow, what an amazing life! I do believe he was one of those people who don’t need much sleep. He seems to have been a very busy man, and exceptionally productive.
"the arguments for creationism that I had been reading were duplicitous and hallow." I'm sure creationists thought their arguments were hallowed, but I think Michael meant "hollow" here.
Thank you for sharing the life of Bayard Brattstrom. Those of us who have had an influential professor like him in our lives are indeed fortunate.
I was not familiar with Professor Brattstrom. It sounds like he was a wonderful human being!
My tender years were in the 80s in a house that featured many books of Morris, Gish, and Ken Ham (and others). Around 12 years old I even went to a YEC seminar where Gish was the main speaker...
It's wonderful to hear Brattstrom helped disabuse you of your creationist confusion! I didn't have a professor's help, but your work (and the work of others) ca. 2001 taught me the astonishing power and importance of critical thinking. Consequently, I decided to investigate my creationist presumptions. I stumbled upon talkorigins.org back then, tumbled down the rabbit hole, and fell out the other end with exactly the same revelation you had:
"oh my God…this evolution stuff is true!"
The course of my life was forever altered.
Much gratitude for Brttstrom and his role in your life! He and those like him are always missed when they pass. But the reverberations go ever-onward; and in ways we can never fully know. Much gratitude for you and your work! All these years later, I'm still trying to do whatever small part I can to encourage others to always seek the truth.
Creationists and evolutionists are both wrong. They both think all life somehow got sttarted at some point in ntime and has continued ever since by reproduction alone. They only differ on the minor point of exactly HOW it got started.
I once visited a biologist the late Bernard Grad, at McGill University in Montreal. He showed me blown-up photos of some alge he had made from nothing but fully charred coal dust which had been passed through the flame of a Bunson burner on a spatula so there could be nothing alive in it. He had thousands of feet of time-lapse motion pictures showing the alge developing from the coal particles in a sterile solution with a few other sterile ingredients added.
I am not an alge specialist. One alge looks like another to me. But these alge had been identified by other biologists at McGill as belonging to KNOWN SPECIES. Even though the time-lapse pictures showed they formed by a process of natural organization without any ancestors or ancestral connection to the known forms they resembled so closely they could not be told apart from them.
Dr.-Grad told me he had actually been trying to make ameboas, which he had been able to do before on several occassions, but one time he got the recipie wrong and got alge by mistake. He then went back over the experiment and found what he did wrong so now he could get either ameboas or alge at will.
He also showed me a stack of papers he had written that he said he did not dare publish because he wanted to keep his job. That a fully tenured member of the faculty could have such a fear explains at least in part why this type of discovery is not better known.
This had me wandering around Montreal in a daze for three days mumbling to myself as I assimilated the astounding implications. If the process goes on all the time in nature, all around us, as he thought, but is undetected because of the predjudices of modern science, it implies that an extinct specis is not gone forever, but if the exact conditions under which it first formed are duplicated it will form again.
These conditions mainly consist of temperature, salinity, CO2 to oxygen ratio, and wave length and intesity of light the forming organism is exposed to. Colored glass slides used as a filter to change the wave length of sunlight will change what species will form. This can never be seen by a scientist because in a modern laboratory they always use artificial lighting and only direct sunlight will have the desired effect.
Other biologists have reported the formation of large, multicelled organisms also, directly from non-living matterials without any ancestral connection to the organisms they closely resemble. Grass, a macroscopic multi-celled plant, has been seen under a microscope to form from desert sand that contained no seeds under the right conditions. A biologist told me he had seen it but, ''I still don't believe it.''
But no single species normally forms alone; usually a cohort of organisms forms and they all fit together in an integrated ecosystem. That is why an introduced species is usually harmful. It originally formed under different conditions.
Science made a mistake in throwing out the theory of spontaneous generation in the 19th century debates between Pasteur and Bastian. Bastian was right and Pasteur was wrong.
The formation of life is a commonplace ocurrence and every species now living must have formed that way in the first instance, them continued to reproduce itself afterwards by the well-known means.
What an uplifting account of a life well lived. Thank you for highlighting this man and his works.
Wow, what an amazing life! I do believe he was one of those people who don’t need much sleep. He seems to have been a very busy man, and exceptionally productive.
"the arguments for creationism that I had been reading were duplicitous and hallow." I'm sure creationists thought their arguments were hallowed, but I think Michael meant "hollow" here.
Thank you for sharing the life of Bayard Brattstrom. Those of us who have had an influential professor like him in our lives are indeed fortunate.
I was not familiar with Professor Brattstrom. It sounds like he was a wonderful human being!
My tender years were in the 80s in a house that featured many books of Morris, Gish, and Ken Ham (and others). Around 12 years old I even went to a YEC seminar where Gish was the main speaker...
It's wonderful to hear Brattstrom helped disabuse you of your creationist confusion! I didn't have a professor's help, but your work (and the work of others) ca. 2001 taught me the astonishing power and importance of critical thinking. Consequently, I decided to investigate my creationist presumptions. I stumbled upon talkorigins.org back then, tumbled down the rabbit hole, and fell out the other end with exactly the same revelation you had:
"oh my God…this evolution stuff is true!"
The course of my life was forever altered.
Much gratitude for Brttstrom and his role in your life! He and those like him are always missed when they pass. But the reverberations go ever-onward; and in ways we can never fully know. Much gratitude for you and your work! All these years later, I'm still trying to do whatever small part I can to encourage others to always seek the truth.
Thank you, and wishing you all the best,
-Lance
Creationists and evolutionists are both wrong. They both think all life somehow got sttarted at some point in ntime and has continued ever since by reproduction alone. They only differ on the minor point of exactly HOW it got started.
I once visited a biologist the late Bernard Grad, at McGill University in Montreal. He showed me blown-up photos of some alge he had made from nothing but fully charred coal dust which had been passed through the flame of a Bunson burner on a spatula so there could be nothing alive in it. He had thousands of feet of time-lapse motion pictures showing the alge developing from the coal particles in a sterile solution with a few other sterile ingredients added.
I am not an alge specialist. One alge looks like another to me. But these alge had been identified by other biologists at McGill as belonging to KNOWN SPECIES. Even though the time-lapse pictures showed they formed by a process of natural organization without any ancestors or ancestral connection to the known forms they resembled so closely they could not be told apart from them.
Dr.-Grad told me he had actually been trying to make ameboas, which he had been able to do before on several occassions, but one time he got the recipie wrong and got alge by mistake. He then went back over the experiment and found what he did wrong so now he could get either ameboas or alge at will.
He also showed me a stack of papers he had written that he said he did not dare publish because he wanted to keep his job. That a fully tenured member of the faculty could have such a fear explains at least in part why this type of discovery is not better known.
This had me wandering around Montreal in a daze for three days mumbling to myself as I assimilated the astounding implications. If the process goes on all the time in nature, all around us, as he thought, but is undetected because of the predjudices of modern science, it implies that an extinct specis is not gone forever, but if the exact conditions under which it first formed are duplicated it will form again.
These conditions mainly consist of temperature, salinity, CO2 to oxygen ratio, and wave length and intesity of light the forming organism is exposed to. Colored glass slides used as a filter to change the wave length of sunlight will change what species will form. This can never be seen by a scientist because in a modern laboratory they always use artificial lighting and only direct sunlight will have the desired effect.
Other biologists have reported the formation of large, multicelled organisms also, directly from non-living matterials without any ancestral connection to the organisms they closely resemble. Grass, a macroscopic multi-celled plant, has been seen under a microscope to form from desert sand that contained no seeds under the right conditions. A biologist told me he had seen it but, ''I still don't believe it.''
But no single species normally forms alone; usually a cohort of organisms forms and they all fit together in an integrated ecosystem. That is why an introduced species is usually harmful. It originally formed under different conditions.
Science made a mistake in throwing out the theory of spontaneous generation in the 19th century debates between Pasteur and Bastian. Bastian was right and Pasteur was wrong.
https://www.amazon.com.mx/Sparks-Life-Darwinism-Spontaneous-Generation/dp/0674009991
The formation of life is a commonplace ocurrence and every species now living must have formed that way in the first instance, them continued to reproduce itself afterwards by the well-known means.