On 6 June 2018 at 17:08, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 8:48 AM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> >> >> > >> Science answers plenty of certain types of "why" >> questions: > > > It would be more accurate to say Science answers "how” questions; "why" > questions imply intent and intent needs somebody to have a intention and > there may not be one.
"Why is a wh-word. We use why to talk about reasons and explanations." https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/question-words/why An example given: "Why is the Earth round?" I understand this "how"/"why" distinction to explain the nature of science, but it doesn't really work as an absolute rule when applied to everyday speech. Reasons can be attributed to evolutionary dynamics, for example. >> > Why are most plants green? > > > If somebody intended plants to get energy from the sun He would have made > them black, even red or blue would have been more efficient than green > because our sun pumps out more energy in the green part of the spectrum than > in the red or the blue, and so plants just waste most of light’s energy by > reflecting it away. Sure, I agree that there is overwhelming evidence for incompetent design (aka evolution), as opposed to intelligent design. > But in the early days of life on this planet random > mutation and natural selection stumbled upon a key molecule in the > photosynthesis process, chlorophyll, that just happens to be green and it > works OK, not perfectly but OK. In Evolution you don't have to be perfect > you just have to be better than the competition. And once Evolution started > to go down the chlorophyll path it soon became committed and it became > virtually impossible to backtrack and look for something better than > chlorophyll. Ok, so didn't you just explain why plants are green? Telmo. > John K Clark > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
