Oh my god.

I won't attempt to reply to all that but I respect your views and I am
impressed.

"Ted Byers" wrote in message
.. .

"Geir Harris Hedemark" wrote in message
...
"Al" writes:
While it is hard to find this fact in most European or even American
history
books there were already civilizations, tribes and nations of people
living,
loving and killing each other here for 10,000 years or more
before the Europeans sailed over in their boats and dropped off
settlers,
trinkets, beads, Christianity, gun powder and blankets laced with
small
pox
virus.

According to The Lore (previously mentioned), the natives of Vinland
were not hostile until they traded for some milk. They couldn't take
the lactose, and thought they had been poisoned. Exit the vikings.

How they got a cow onto one of the ships, and kept it there for a
couple of months, we will never know.

Geir

Actually, given current knowledge of viking vessels, we will know sooner
or
later. Some of the viking ships were quite large, and we know that they
had
plenty of experience transporting them around the viking world. After
all,
they had to get them to Iceland and Greenland also, not to mention local
trade within Scandinavia.

But it is unlikely that even the vikings were the first Europeans to visit
North America. There is substantial recent research in a number of
fields,
such as genetics and ancient history, that suggests that there has long
been
European contact with North America, not to mention a much longer history
of
human occupation, perhaps as long as 50k years. Of course, what most
people
believe about american history represents an accepted dogma developed over
the past few decades, and it is that dogma that is increasingly being
brought into question. There is growing evidence that the "land bridge"
alleged to have existed between siberia and north america was never a
viable
route; a act largely ignored by historians who have built their
reputations
on existing dogma. If one looks at the physiognomy of native americas,
there is a dual gradient of decreasing European traits as one moves
westward, and a decreasing asian traits as one moves eastward; precisely
what you'd expect with two distinct populations meeting with limited gene
flow: such trends would be guaranteed to be absent if there was either no
gene flow or a rapid gene flow, such as might be observed in modern times
with the amount of travel common today. There is an obscure reference in,
IIRC, Pliny's geography to a bay that could well be the St. Lawrence
estuary: it is at the right latitude, and has the right number of islands
in
the right configuration. While it is not adequate as proof of anything,
it
presents a number of interesting problems. The most serius problem is,
given that the probability of him getting it right merely by chance is
indistinguishable from zero, how did he get so much right? If I have not
misunderstood him, that puts european contact with america back almost
2000
years. I have not seen a convincing explanation of that tidbit of
information, apart from Celtic travels to the gulf. And, it is clear from
Julius Ceasar's description of the ships used by the British Celts that
they
had huge vessels capable of crossing the ocean: vessals that would have
been
much too large and expensive to build for merely crossing the channel. (I
am working from memories of studies I did on this close to 15 years ago
for
my Ed.D. thesis, some details are a bit fuzzy.)

lame attempt to bring the discussion back on topic on
I guess the thing to remember regarding orchid breeding, or any other
research and development or any kind of exploration, is that, apart from
rare accidents, the most effective R&D involves extending work done by
others: predecessors and colleagues. In my own work on resilient
sustainable development, I build on a mathematical framework in calculus
and
geometry that has been built up over the last century and a half give or
take a little bit, depending on where you would say that these forms of
mathematics begin. We, as researchers, use both our own experience and
the
experience of others to guide our investigations in directions we believe
will be most useful.

Regarding Bolero's comment, refering to R&D costs, that "I can do it
without
research." That is only partly true. Yes, you can do your crosses purely
randomly, but the moment you begin to use your experience to determine
which
crosses to do, you can be said to be doing research, however simple that
research may be. Most folk cooking at home for their families can be said
to be doing basic research in food science. If you think about it, Mom
following a new recipe is conceptually no different than Sis following a
protocol to do an experiment in the nearest university; and in both cases,
what they do next will depend on how their work turned out. If Dad hated
the result of the recipe, Mom probably won't use it again, or she will
modify it based on his feedback: Mom is doing such R&D every time she
tests
a new recipe or modifies an old one based on the reaction her family has
to
whatever it is that it produces. Similarly, Sis will modify her protocol,
or do a number of rather different experiments, based on the outcome from
her experiment. In both cases, this is science at its best! The moment
you
decide on doing a particular cross, based even on liking both parents to
be
used in the cross, you can be said to be doing R&D. Yes, you might find
something interesting with your random crosses, but you haven't a rational
hope of meeting a predefined objective, such as a true blue phal with a
heavenly scent, without a well defined plan based on extensive research.
It
is this that is quite expensive and warrants a degree of protection. And
this is necessary, since such R&D is the only way to acocmplish in a
matter
of decades what would take many millenia by chance, if it could occur at
all
by chance.
\lame attempt to bring the discussion back on topic off ;-)

Cheers,

Ted