Posted on 07/09/2003 12:08:32 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
FORT WORTH, Texas - (KRT) -
The long-running debate over the origins of mankind continues Wednesday before the Texas State Board of Education, and the result could change the way science is taught here and across the nation.
Local and out-of-state lobbying groups will try to convince the board that the next generation of biology books should contain new scientific evidence that reportedly pokes holes in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Many of those groups say that they are not pushing to place a divine creator back into science books, but to show that Darwin's theory is far from a perfect explanation of the origin of mankind.
"It has become a battle ground," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of theNational Center of Science Education, which is dedicated to defending the teaching of evolution in the classroom.
Almost 45 scientists, educators and special interest groups from across the state will testify at the state's first public hearing this year on the next generation of textbooks for the courses of biology, family and career studies and English as a Second Language.
Approved textbooks will be available for classrooms for the 2004-05 school year. And because Texas is the second largest textbook buyer in the nation, the outcome could affect education nationwide.
The Texas Freedom Network and a handful of educators held a conference call last week to warn that conservative Christians and special interest organizations will try to twist textbook content to further their own views.
"We are seeing the wave of the future of religious right's attack on basic scientific principles," said Samantha Smoot, executive director of the network, an anti-censorship group and opponent of the radical right.
Those named by the network disagree with the claim, including the Discovery Institute and its Science and Culture Center of Seattle.
"Instead of wasting time looking at motivations, we wish people would look at the facts," said John West, associate director of the center.
"Our goal nationally is to encourage schools and educators to include more about evolution, including controversies about various parts of Darwinian theory that exists between even evolutionary scientists," West said. "We are a secular think tank."
The institute also is perhaps the nation's leading proponent of intelligent design - the idea that life is too complex to have occurred without the help of an unknown, intelligent being.
It pushed this view through grants to teachers and scientists, including Michael J. Behe, professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. The Institute receives millions of dollars from philanthropists and foundations dedicated to discrediting Darwin's theory.
The center sent the state board a 55-page report that graded 11 high school biology textbooks submitted for adoption. None earned a grade above a C minus. The report also includes four arguments it says show that evolutionary theory is not as solid as presented in biology textbooks.
Discovery Institute Fellow Raymond Bohlin, who also is executive director of Probe Ministries, based in Richardson, Texas, will deliver that message in person Wednesday before the State Board of Education. Bohlin has a doctorate degree in molecular cell biology from the University of Texas at Dallas.
"If we can simply allow students to see that evolution is not an established fact, that leaves freedom for students to pursue other ideas," Bohlin said. "All I can do is continue to point these things out and hopefully get a group that hears and sees relevant data and insist on some changes."
The executive director of Texas Citizens for Science, Steven Schafersman, calls the institute's information "pseudoscience nonsense." Schafersman is an evolutionary scientist who, for more than two decades, taught biology, geology, paleontology and environmental science at a number of universities, including the University of Houston and the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
"It sounds plausible to people who are not scientifically informed," Schafersman said. "But they are fraudulently trying to deceive board members. They might succeed, but it will be over the public protests of scientists."
The last time Texas looked at biology books, in 1997, the State Board of Education considered replacing them all with new ones that did not mention evolution. The board voted down the proposal by a slim margin.
The state requires that evolution be in textbooks. But arguments against evolution have been successful over the last decade in other states. Alabama, New Mexico and Nebraska made changes that, to varying degrees, challenge the pre-eminence of evolution in the scientific curriculum.
In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education voted to wash the concepts of evolution from the state's science curricula. A new state board has since put evolution back in. Last year, the Cobb County school board in Georgia voted to include creationism in science classes.
Texas education requirements demand that textbooks include arguments for and against evolution, said Neal Frey, an analyst working with perhaps Texas' most famous textbook reviewers, Mel and Norma Gabler.
The Gablers, of Longview, have been reviewing Texas textbooks for almost four decades. They describe themselves as conservative Christians. Some of their priorities include making sure textbooks include scientific flaws in arguments for evolution.
"None of the texts truly conform to the state's requirements that the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories be presented to students," Frey said.
The Texas textbook proclamation of 2001, which is part of the standard for the state's curriculum, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, requires that biology textbooks instruct students so they may "analyze, review and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weakness using scientific evidence and information."
The state board is empowered to reject books only for factual errors or for not meeting the state's curriculum requirements. If speakers convince the state board that their evidence is scientifically sound, members may see little choice but to demand its presence in schoolbooks.
Proposed books already have been reviewed and approved by Texas Tech University. After a public hearing Wednesday and another Sept. 10, the state board is scheduled to adopt the new textbooks in November.
Satisfying the state board is only half the battle for textbook publishers. Individual school districts choose which books to use and are reimbursed by the state unless they buy texts rejected by the state board.
Districts can opt not to use books with passages they find objectionable. So when speakers at the public hearings criticize what they perceived as flaws in various books - such as failing to portray the United States or Christianity in a positive light - many publishers listen.
New books will be distributed next summer.
State Board member Terri Leo said the Discovery Institute works with esteemed scientists and that their evidence should be heard.
"You cannot teach students how to think if you don't present both sides of a scientific issue," Leo said. "Wouldn't you think that the body that has the responsibility of what's in the classroom would look at all scientific arguments?"
State board member Bob Craig said he had heard of the Intelligent Design theory.
"I'm going in with an open mind about everybody's presentation," Craig said. "I need to hear their presentation before I make any decisions or comments.
State board member Mary Helen Berlanga said she wanted to hear from local scientists.
"If we are going to discuss scientific information in the textbooks, the discussion will have to remain scientific," Berlanga said. "I'd like to hear from some of our scientists in the field on the subject."
Yes, a lie, which was easily disproven by real science which Darwin used to put down some human beings as belonging to inferior races - which Hitler and others quickly picked up as an excuse for their foul deeds. All of which proves three things:
1. Darwin was a racist.
2. Darwin was not a scientist.
3. Darwin would use anything, no matter how unfounded, to promote his despicable theory.
Shows how much you know! ;^) Those are the pillars, Hannah of the horn mentioned in her prayer. Of course, Hannah was a well known scientist who mentioned dunghill in the same prayer.
No, it is prophecy and not literal.
But is it prime?
;-)
Holy mackerel! Everyone knows a nematode is a worm!
The DNA evidence in that article does not rest upon any claim about whether the "vast majority" of DNA is junk or not.
Indeed it does. First of all, while the word 'psudogene' sounds scientific, it is total nonsense. All it means is that it looks like a gene but it does not produce any proteins that anyone knows about. It is essentially, what evolutionists accuse their opponents of all the time - an argument from ignorance. An argument whose basis is that because we do not know what that DNA is for, it is there just to prove evolution, which is total nonsense. First of all, the DNA in the human genome gets reproduces in just about every human cell (with a few significant exceptions). We are talking about some 100 trillion cells. To reproduce garbage which is essentially what you are talking about, just so that evolutionists nowadays could use it to prove their theory is not only nonsensical, but also a denial of a central part of their theory - that unfitness is destroyed. As a I said, only the tremendously arrogant evolutionists would be willing to make such a silly claim. Since the code they are speaking about is indeed the one they also call 'junk DNA' and which science has shown is even more important than the DNA in genes, the evolutionists have been shown up to be talking - as usual - totally unscientific nonsense.
And since the available evidence does indeed indicate that most human DNA is "junk" of one type or another (retroposons, "stuttered" repetitions, etc.), that *is* the *scientific* position, not an "unscientific" one as you ironically assert.
First you state that this has nothing to do with junk DNA and then you try to talk away the scientific evidence that junk DNA is not junk. For your information, the last half dozen years just about all that biologists have been doing is looking for the purpose of this 'junk DNA' and scientists do not call it junk, they call it 'non-coding' DNA nowadays because the evolutionist LIE has been totally disproven by REAL SCIENCE. In fact a Nobel Prize winner said that the genes are just factories, the control of those factories is outside the genes. That part which is outside the genes is the part which the evolutionists moronically and/or dishonestly called 'junk DNA'. And indeed it is correct to call their assertion 'moronic and/or dishonest'. It should have been obvious (and indeed was) to many scientists and even non-scientists, that genes have to be regulated and that such regulation required very specific controls. That is the massive job which your 'junk DNA' does.
But, let's stop wasting time and go to the nub. Fact is that pseudogenes are there for a purpose as the following shows:
"Pseudogenes have long been considered merely defective copies of functioning genes and relics of our evolutionary past. New research on mice, however, has found evidence suggesting the pseudogene Makorin1-p1 plays a crucial regulatory role in the expression of the coding gene (Makorin1) within the cell. This finding is the latest example of research discovering sub-cellular functioning where it was not expected.
Findings like these have important implications for the authority of Darwinian evolution. A major element of the Darwinian argument springs from the belief that an intelligent designer would not create biological systems that look like what biologists see. Negative evidence for a designer, then, is seen as positive evidence for the purposeless Darwinian mechanism. For example, in “Life’s Grand Design” biologist Ken Miller (1994) states,
“The theory of intelligent design [ID] cannot explain the presence of nonfunctional pseudogenes unless it is willing to allow that the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles. Evolution, in contrast, can easily explain them as nothing more than failed experiments in a random process of gene duplication that persist in the genome as evolutionary remnants.”
So, Miller asserts that [Darwinian] evolution, and not ID, can explain the non-functionality of pseudogenes and therefore, their presence should be viewed as positive evidence for evolution. Many other Darwinists have pointed to the non-functionality of pseudogenes in debates with creationists and IDers – even a cursory search of debate transcripts on the Internet can verify this.
Now that it has been found that at least one pseudogene plays a functional role, can pseudogene functionality be used as evidence against evolution? Evidently not if you’re committed to Darwinism. In the same journal article that uncovered the functional role of Makorin1-p1 we find the following after-the-fact explanation:
“Indeed, it [the functioning pseudogene] suggests that evolutionary forces can work in both directions. The forward direction is driven by pressures to create new genes from existing ones, an imperfect process that often generates defective copies of the original.
But these defective copies need not be evolutionary dead ends, because pressures in the reverse direction could modify them for specific tasks.” (Hirotsune, et al., 2003)
From: Wedge Update 5/23/03
So the above not only shows that evolutionists are absolutely wrong about pseudogenes, but also their duplicity and their acting like Communists, Nazis and the totalitarians in 1984 who the day after having had their long held statements shown to be the absolute garbage they were, start claiming that they always said it was so. So get with the program before you face a pogrom!
One of them was almost certainly Martin Luther.
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