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."
Very few evolutionists accepted Piltdown Man at all, as he did not fit within the framework of the theory (if he had turned out to be authentic, the creationists would have had a definite feather in their caps). Indeed, it was evolutionists who eventually exposed the fraud. Anomolous fossils are never ignored.
Probably just trying to keep it civil.
Why? Those who don't hold to a belief in a higher power have to live here too. Indeed, as humans are by nature social critters, and as social critters need ground rules governing their interactions with one-another (or else the social grouping falls apart and the members get eaten by bigger, meaner critters), it stands to reason that basic ground rules (morality) would come into being even without the intervention of the Divine.
I doubt that seriously. The concept that rights only exist if one can defend them has a long philosophical history. "Divinely-endowed" rights were originally used by monarchs to secure their holds upon power. The rest of the population was able to secure only those rights they were willing to defend against said monarchs.
My favorite example is the card deck. Shuffle a deck of 52 thoroughly and lay it out. Whatever it is you're seeing, it had one chance in 52 factorial (52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48 ... x 1) of being there. Wow! Not very likely!
Do it again, whatever you get will be similarly improbable. Every time, you're guaranteed to get one and only one from a large space of possibilities.
An orange is life.
Do it all day long. The cumulative results at the end of the day will really be improbable. But you did it without even working up a sweat. Amazing! Imagine the odds against the sequence you'll get if you do this for a whole month. The mind boggles. It's a miracle!
You have never refuted my prior point. I will concede that evolution is not a fact. It is a theory. Anyone who says that evolution is a hard core fact is wrong. But there is evidence which backs it up, which you are too stubborn to admit. But my prior point is that you cannot disprove a well known theory on free republic. You can make a good argument, but you cannot disprove it which you have many times stated. It's laughable to think that.
In fact, if you know in advance you're going to shuffle, lay out, and record the deck N times, you know in advance that your cumulative end result will be one in N x (52!). The retrospective astonishment factor ("What are the odds of anyone ending up where I just ended up?") are huge for any large N, yes.
Again, how do you make statements like that? Your use of the word "scientists" is generous to say the least.
On post 2851 you said: Unless you show me the state-space and the selection criteria, you have no notion wheather ANY starting conditions for the universe were likely or unlikely to any degree. It is a question--Chaiken and Kolmogorof notwithstanding--in my opinion, standing outside of space and time, which are what science, at minimum, need by way of evidence to think scientific thoughts about, including the construction of statistical calculations.
It appears that you dismiss my statement that ”algorithm from inception is intelligent design” by essentially asserting that a state prior to inception, null, is outside scientific inquiry, i.e. outside of space/time.
I vigorously disagree and assert that it is the subject of much scientific inquiry:
There are numerous scientific efforts to explain the ultra early universe, as summarized in this article by Sir Martin Rees. In his book, Just Six Numbers Sir Rees “argues that six numbers underlie the fundamental physical properties of the universe, and that each is the precise value needed to permit life to flourish. “ The fundamental constants are manifest on large scales: Stability and Size of Galaxies from Planck’s Constant (PDF).
Moreover, the sound waves in the early universe that we have been discussing were not even addressed in Sir Rees’ summary.
I see that the pattern of the sound, the six numbers, are pieces of that algorithm coming together. I believe others see it as well, and suggest that is the driving force behind the multi-universe theories – specifically to defer having to face up to the existence of null - i.e. multi-universe theories still require an inception.
For lurkers, I have also been asserting that algorithms are intelligent design per se. That is, algorithms are the designed intelligence from which results, including information content and new algorithms, emerge. Again, here is an example paraphrased from Roger Penrose’s Emporer’s New Mind, Chapter 2. An algorithm, briefly, is a step-by-step instruction. Penrose uses Euclid’s algorithm for finding the highest common factor between two numbers as an example:
The algorithm is language. We already know that sound lies at the root of the physical universe, so IMHO, the algorithm itself can be discovered:
The peaks indicate harmonics in the sound waves that filled the early, dense universe. Until some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot that matter and radiation were entangled in a kind of soup in which sound waves (pressure waves) could vibrate. The CMB is a relic of the moment when the universe had cooled enough so that photons could "decouple" from electrons, protons, and neutrons; then atoms formed and light went on its way.
At the moment of decoupling, the pressure waves left telltale traces of their existence in the form of slight temperature variations in the CMB, which in the intervening 10 billion years or so has cooled to a mere three degrees Kelvin...
The width and position of the first peak indicate that fluctuations on all scales were already in place at the earliest moments of the universe. A period of rapid expansion in the early moments of the universe could have set these perturbations in place by blowing up microscopic quantum fluctuations to astronomical scales -- seeding the galaxies and nets of galaxies we see today.
One more thing. From your post 2853 to Gore3000:
Putting me aside, however, it is only in the fevered brains of creationists that there is a pitched battle between evolutionary theory and christian belief.
The challenge to evolution theory is not solely grounded in religion. There is also a pitched battle between evolution theory and directed panspermia . The arguments and counter-arguments are pretty much the same. Intelligent Design spans both.
Physics is a lot cleaner, mathematically, than biology. Yet, randomness is a very large part of physical processes. Understand that randomness is biology comes with multiple contingencies.
The presence of algorithm from inception is proof of intelligent design.
Hardly. Natural selection is an algorithm.
Piltdown Man was debunked (outside of England, of course) because the parts didn't fit evolutionary theory. There are articles about the likelihood of fraud at least as far back as the early 1920s. (I think I remember seeing a 1916 article claiming fraud, too.)
Creationists did nothing to disprove Piltdown. The final nail in Piltdown's coffin was the carbon dating results.
they came from---and are going back to plasma/bubble/bangs
...they are accidents---freaks/mutants/morphs of plasma/morphing---
no design/God/creator...
So this is why you choose not to try and understand evolution? Because it would be inconvenient, difficult, and hard for your children? You make it seem so.
Best of luck in your endevour. Frankly, however, it doesn't take all that much effort to understand and dismiss the defective arguments and primitive tactics of the award-giver. If you hang around long enough, you'll certainly be a contender.
As a part-time lurker, part-time newbie I can attest that everything goes much smoother and much more civilized when gore3000 isn't around.
Natural selection is an algorithm.
My statement ("the presence of algorithm from inception is proof of intelligent design") delimits to "algorithm from inception".
Natural selection applies to material existence and thus follows inception, i.e. null, void, empty, the beginning, first cause. So although I agree that natural selection is an algorithm, it is not an algorithm from inception.
I don't understand your statement: Understand that randomness is biology comes with multiple contingencies.
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