Posted on 12/11/2002 6:28:08 AM PST by A2J
By WILL SENTELL
wsentell@theadvocate.com
Capitol news bureau
High school biology textbooks would include a disclaimer that evolution is only a theory under a change approved Tuesday by a committee of the state's top school board.
If the disclaimer wins final approval, it would apparently make Louisiana just the second state in the nation with such a provision. The other is Alabama, which is the model for the disclaimer backers want in Louisiana.
Alabama approved its policy six or seven years ago after extensive controversy that included questions over the religious overtones of the issue.
The change approved Tuesday requires Louisiana education officials to check on details for getting publishers to add the disclaimer to biology textbooks.
It won approval in the board's Student and School Standards/ Instruction Committee after a sometimes contentious session.
"I don't believe I evolved from some primate," said Jim Stafford, a board member from Monroe. Stafford said evolution should be offered as a theory, not fact.
Whether the proposal will win approval by the full state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on Thursday is unclear.
Paul Pastorek of New Orleans, president of the board, said he will oppose the addition.
"I am not prepared to go back to the Dark Ages," Pastorek said.
"I don't think state boards should dictate editorial content of school textbooks," he said. "We shouldn't be involved with that."
Donna Contois of Metairie, chairwoman of the committee that approved the change, said afterward she could not say whether it will win approval by the full board.
The disclaimer under consideration says the theory of evolution "still leaves many unanswered questions about the origin of life.
"Study hard and keep an open mind," it says. "Someday you may contribute to the theories of how living things appeared on earth."
Backers say the addition would be inserted in the front of biology textbooks used by students in grades 9-12, possibly next fall.
The issue surfaced when a committee of the board prepared to approve dozens of textbooks used by both public and nonpublic schools. The list was recommended by a separate panel that reviews textbooks every seven years.
A handful of citizens, one armed with a copy of Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species," complained that biology textbooks used now are one-sided in promoting evolution uncritically and are riddled with factual errors.
"If we give them all the facts to make up their mind, we have educated them," Darrell White of Baton Rouge said of students. "Otherwise we have indoctrinated them."
Darwin wrote that individuals with certain characteristics enjoy an edge over their peers and life forms developed gradually millions of years ago.
Backers bristled at suggestions that they favor the teaching of creationism, which says that life began about 6,000 years ago in a process described in the Bible's Book of Genesis.
White said he is the father of seven children, including a 10th-grader at a public high school in Baton Rouge.
He said he reviewed 21 science textbooks for use by middle and high school students. White called Darwin's book "racist and sexist" and said students are entitled to know more about controversy that swirls around the theory.
"If nothing else, put a disclaimer in the front of the textbooks," White said.
John Oller Jr., a professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, also criticized the accuracy of science textbooks under review. Oller said he was appearing on behalf of the Louisiana Family Forum, a Christian lobbying group.
Oller said the state should force publishers to offer alternatives, correct mistakes in textbooks and fill in gaps in science teachings. "We are talking about major falsehoods that should be addressed," he said.
Linda Johnson of Plaquemine, a member of the board, said she supports the change. Johnson said the new message of evolution "will encourage students to go after the facts."
There is not a single word of Christ that can be used to justify mass murder or any of the evils attributed by atheists against Christianity. However, there is much in Darwinism, in evolution, in atheism which supports mass murder and the crimes of totalitarian regimes such as eugenics, racism, and a general disregard for human life.
Might be, but evolution explicitly condones eugenics and the destruction of entire races. This is not a misapplication.
Tell it to the folks killing in Christ's name. Better yet, tell it to their victims - I'm sure they'll be enormously comforted by that...
Again, where does the theory of evolution advocate any destruction of races at all? Please give the peer-reviewed papers.
Note: there is a difference between positive and negative eugenics. Evolutionary theory takes no position toward either.
You'll get no argument from me on that point.
"Assume all that's true. So what? Why is that important?"
My tax dollars are paying for that kind of garbage to be inculcated in my children and my neighbor's children. I would prefer that it were not so. Maybe it makes no difference to you.
Not exactly. A comforting creationoid belief, but very far from the truth. Marx started publishing his commie material long before Darwin had published his theory of evolution. The two ideas were and are entirely unrelated, except in the minds of creationoids.
Another Patrick special half-truth which makes his statement a complete lie. The first publcation of Das Kapital was in 1867 - 8 years after Darwin. In addition , as you are completely aware, Marx thought so highly of the Origins and that it fit so well with his theory that he intended to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin but Darwin declined. So the commity of the two theories is an undeniable fact.
They were refuted about 8.4 minutes after you posted them.
Here is a list of laureates for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Here is a list of the laureates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Since all of their discoveries conclusively falsify evolution, it should be easy for you to pick your favorite one and tell us how.
As in the kind of "peer review" that meets the ideological approval of you and your closed band of colleagues?
But it's the truth. Or doesn't that matter, so long as communists like it?
It certainly is and natural selection is not observable. Intelligent design however certainly is observable. Just like we can see that a painting had a human maker, we can see design in the Universe. That's why atheists have to propose infinite universes in order to counter the design argument. Life too is obviously intelligently designed that is why atheists cannot even formulate a hypothesis of abiogenesis which fits scientifically known facts. Everywhere we look in science, we see design because after all if we lived in a random universe there could be no scientific laws at all.
That is, in all countries whose political philosophy is based on the theory of evolution...
I can see where a political philosophy based on the theory of evolution would have no motive to consider human life sacred above any other.
Nuts. And all this time I thought we were discussing mere theories.
...and DNA is God made symbols.
Reading Toqueville was the first time I realized that not only was slavery bad for "them", but it was bad for "us" too.
I'm thankful to have come from a poor family.
Have you ever even SEEN a peer-reviewed journal? Because, if not, I suspect your sources are leading you astray again. I posed this question to gore3000 back in post 1372.
In the absence of peer-reviewed journals, how should scientific knowledge, discoveries, and information be verified and disseminated?
The timetable is a half-truth which makes it a VERY BIG LIE. Marx's most important work (Das Kapital) was written eight years after the Origins and not finished till 1885. So he had plenty of time to imbibe the waters of evolution.
Publications Books: 1. The Poverty of Philosophy (1847, 1956); 2. Communist Manifesto (1848, 1972); 3. The Class Struggles in France (1848, 1972); 4. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859, 1971); 5. Capital , vol 1, (1867, 1976), vols 2 and 3, ed. F. Engels (1885-94, 1909, 1978); 6. Theories of Surplus Value , 3 vols (1905-10, 1963); 7. Collected Works , 12 vols (1927-35); 8. Foundation of the Critique of Political Economy (1939-41, 1973).
From: Marx and Engels .
Not quite. Have never seen the Sermon on the Mount turned to evil ends. In addition, evolution was evil from the git go:
"P.S. Would you advise me to tell Murray [his publisher] that my book is not more un-orthodox than the subject makes inevitable. That I do not discuss the origin of man. That I do not bring in any discussion about Genesis, &c, &c., and only give facts, and such conclusions from them as seem to me fair.
Or had I better say nothing to Murray, and assume that he cannot object to this much unorthodoxy, which in fact is not more than any Geological Treatise which runs sharp counter to Genesis."
From: Daniel J. Boorstein, The Discoverers, page 475.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Darwin, "The Descent of Man", Chapter V.
" Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. He is impelled by nearly the same motives as the lower animals, when they are left to their own free choice, though he is in so far superior to them that he highly values mental charms and virtues. On the other hand he is strongly attracted by mere wealth or rank. Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does good service, who aids towards this end."
Darwin, Descent of Man, Chapter 21.
"I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world."
Darwin to Graham, July 3, 1881.
In man the frontal bone consists of a single piece, but in the embryo, and in children, and in almost all the lower mammals, it consists of two pieces separated by a distinct suture. ~~This suture occasionally persists more or less distinctly in man after maturity; and more frequently in ancient than in recent crania, especially, as Canestrini has observed, in those exhumed from the Drift, and belonging to the brachycephalic type. Here again he comes to the same nclusion as in the analogous case of the malar bones. In this, and other instances presently to be given, the cause of ancient races approaching the lower animals in certain characters more frequently than do the modern races, appears to be, that the latter stand at a somewhat greater distance in the long line of descent from their early semi-human progenitors.
Darwin, Descent of Man, Chapter 2.
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