(June 25, 2014 at 10:15 pm)Minimalist Wrote: The article is from 2007 and it does not seem as if they have made much in the way of progress..... although I'm sure the consultants have made a fortune.I can remember a meeting we had with a client back in 1997 or 1998 regarding a state project to build an extension of a subway line in Manhattan. The project was supposed to run 12 years and cost $20 billion (I think those are the numbers, but not 100% sure), and the first thing the guy making the presentation said was that everyone knew that this really meant more like 20 years and $40 billion. He seemed to say it in a half-joking manner, but everyone just nodded as if they understood that yeah, long delays and enormous cost overruns were the norm with government projects.
Seventeen years later, it's still an active project.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
