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."
10 feet? anything you hear?
-- It would depend on how much a public nuisance you create, of course. Cops/juries are pretty good at deciding such matters.
public air waves? newspapers?
No one is forcing me to listen or read, are they?
You don't have the right not to hear a religious message. Even in a public place. It's not in the constitution.
Bull. -- You have no right to be a pest about proselytizing.
You might want to read some of the writings of Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia on the first amendment.
I've read quite a bit. What did I miss?
LOLOL! I got about a block down the road walking the dog after that post and remembered what I had typed:
Kudos to you for never stopping to ask questions!!!
I laughed so hard, I had to stop and my dog was very annoyed. Obviously, I meant exactly the opposite of what I actually said: Kudos to you for always stopping to ask questions!!! ... Duh!
So sorry about that.
Seems kind of illogical to me to say such a thing. Now who would know the Truth better than He who created everything? Is the Truth (with a capital "T") not objective??????
No. In fact, my brother-in-law is a famous neurochemist, and he tells me that it is the subject of much hilarity in his field. Indeed, he has relished lording it over me as a prime example of the presumption of physicists.
Here are some links and sources which may help to explain why I say that the genetic code contains algorithms:
Entropy in the Biological Sciences
Molecular Information Theory and the Theory of Molecular Machines
In the living cell, nucleic acids and proteins, which are scarcely on nodding terms chemically, deal with each other via an information channel, i.e. using software rather than hardware, written in a triplet mathematical code. The advantage of life going digital in this way is much greater flexibility and fidelity (as is also the case with digitization in electronic devices). The situation can be likened to flying a kite versus a radio-controlled plane. A kite is hard-wired to the controller, and is clumsy to control by pulling on the strings. By contrast, a radio-controlled plane is easier to fly because the controllers instructions are digitized and transmitted to the plane, where they are decoded and used to harness local energy sources. The radio waves themselves do not push and pull the plane around; they merely convey the information. Analogously, nucleic acids do not themselves assemble proteins, they relay the instructions for ribosomes to do it. This frees protein assembly from the strictures of chemistry, and permits life to choose whatever amino acid sequences it needs. So, far from deriving from physics and chemistry, biological information is quasi-independent of it. To explain the origin of this information-based control, we need to understand how mere hardware (atoms) wrote its own software.
Note that we must do more than simply explain where information per se came from. A gene is a set of coded instructions (e.g. for the manufacture of a protein). To be effective, there must exist a molecular milieu that can decode and interpret the instructions, and carry them out, otherwise the sequence information in the DNA is just so much gobbledygook. The information is therefore semantic in content, i.e. it must mean something (KEpers, 1985). So we are faced with the task of understanding the nature and origin of semantic, or meaningful, information. Since the very concept of information emerged from communication theory in the realm of human discourse, this is no trivial matter. Information is not like mass or energy: you cant tell by looking whether a molecule has it or not. As yet, there is no info-dynamics comparable to the dynamics of matter, let alone an understanding of how meaning emerges in nature
Can molecular Darwinism explain biogenesis? Maybe, but we have scant idea what those first replicating molecules might be. Examination of real organic replicator systems like RNA/proteins indicates that even the simplest replicators are extremely large and complex molecules, unlikely to form by chance. Moreover, the smaller the molecules the sloppier they copy, suggesting that molecules small enough to form by chance would be very bad at replicating information, and thus subject to Eigens error catastrophe (Eigen & Schuster, 1979), whereby information is eroded by the inaccurate copying process faster than natural selection can inject it.
I concede that if something like the RNA world (Cech, 1986) were given to us ready-made, it has the capacity to evolve into life as we know it. But it strains credulity to suppose that the RNA world sprang into being in one huge chemical transformation. Likely it would be the product of a long series of steps. We can liken the situation to a vast decision tree of chemical reactions, with the RNA world as one tiny twig on the tree. (There is the question of whether there are other twigs that could lead to life, but I shall assume here that the RNA route is the only one.) So we need to understand how a hypothetical class of simple, small replicators navigated through that decision tree and found the RNA twig. Was this just a lucky fluke, or is there something other than a random walk involved?
The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut
Complexity International Brief Comments on Junk DNA (pdf)
Language Like Features in Junk DNA
The Genetic Algorithms archive
International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation ISGEC
If otherwise means that I am forced to pay for the expression of your religion, yes.
And even on that narrowest of points, the evolutionists cannot gain a solid ground with the Cambrian animals and the numerous gaps in the fossil record - exactly where they are most important - speaking loudly against their theory.
That's been my sense as well. I laughed out loud the first time I read about it.
You've made it very clear that your position is that religion belongs in philosophy and not science.
With regard to philosophy, betty boop is the most qualified person known to me.
I never thought it was a treat tpaine
It sure did look like a threat though.
I have philosophers and mathematicians in my family. They're even worse about their presumptions.
I'm glad I could help out.
By the way, I do send my child to a private school.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.