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."
I am not the one who uses empiricist philosophy - you are! Therefore, you are the one that must prove your own method. So really, what you are saying is that you can't prove it. Therefore, you have no basis to assert "that which is not measurable is not real"). Implicit in your statement that the "supernatural cannot be observed" is the BELIEF that only that which is observable is real. That is what I would call "FAITH" since you have no way of proving that using any sort of scientific method.
One of the main reason why science was so successful in the west is the fact that we learned to separate science from the supernatural, something that hasn't occurred in the rest of the world.
Yeah, let's look at what atheistic science has brought us: Global warming, human cloning, abortion, embryonic stem cell research - you call the desruction of human dignity success?
The point is they didn't make that separation but allowed the supernatural to creep in their explanations (i.e. so Allah wills).
What is this - a weak insinuatiion that Christianity is akin to the Taliban? Re-read my past posts (before your arrival). I clearly lay out the FACT that the most important scientific discoveries in the history of man were made by CHRISTIAN men - not muslim men. Do you need a list of their names and discoveries? Why is it that these Christian men, and not some atheistic scientists, were the ones to make these discoveries - was it dumb luck? The Christian worldview presents an ordered universe that is rational and can be comprehended to a certain extent - that is the basis on which Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Pasteur, Pascal, and other Christians based their investigations. An atheist, however, beginning from himself, has no reason to believe the universe is ordered and comprehensible, does he? And why was it that breakthroughs occurred int eh Christian West and not in China or India or Micronesia or Africa? I'll tell you - their worldview did not drive them to understand an ordered universe. You can't deny the historical facts.
Science deals with the universe as we observe it, whether a god made it or not. And just because we think it is ordered doesn't mean that it had to be created by a god.
Here's the rub. You tell me that the supernatural cannot be observed, therefore it must be ignored. At the same time, you take things on FAITH that you cannot observe - e.g. spontaneous generation of life - has a scientist observed that - then by your reasoning it must be ignored and discounted; how about molecule-to-man evolution - has anyone observed that - then it must be ignored and discounted; what about the Big Bang - then it must be ignored and discounted. It seems that you take a lot of things on FAITH that you have not observed! This is an egregious inconsistency on your part and your own argument boomerangs.
And why is it non-rational? What observation (within our universe, or can you see beyond our universe?) has led you to the insight that our universe shows these properties because it has been created by a god? Why can't it show the same properties without being created? What mechanism prevents an uncreated universe to be the same as a created one?
It's non-rational because there is no known way for the complex reality we see to have just popped into being by chance. It is a non-rational leap for you to believe it. What observation tells you it happened by time+chance+energy+matter? Again, your argument boomerangs. Who has the biggest faith here? It takes a great deal more faith to believe this complex universe "just happened" than to believe God created it. Empiricism doesn't work - just face it.
Hardly arbitrary. We observe isotopes. Each has an easily determinable half-life. This is evidence. It can be verified, if you care to expend the effort. True, we do assume that the universe doesn't play tricks, so we assume that the appearance of millions of years worth of apparant radioactive decay didn't happen yesterday in the blink of an eye. But this assumption isn't arbitrary either, as there are no known examples of "instant decay" which have ever been observed. Science uses inductive reasoning to develop its principles, and such principles have been remarkably effective. If there are data which undermine these principles, they will be re-examined. Until then, we're sticking with what works.
It is quite possible to have a physical process that cannot be simulated. In fact most complex processes (fluid behavior, for example) cannot be simulated unless we drop the need to know specific outcomes.
Simple example: try to simulate the behavior of Lotto balls. Easy, perhaps, to make a convincing visual animation, but impossible to simulate the important part -- the outcome.
Actually, I believe it will be possible to build electronic consciousness, but I do not expect to see it in my lifetime, and probably not in my children's lifetime. If it happens, the breakthrough concepts will occur as a side effect of trying to make something useful like a traffic light that knows how to maximize throughput.
I'm glad to hear that because I've suspected that myself. To believe this, however, you have to believe that some constraint is selecting useful inventions. I don't know how to conceptualize the selector for mathematical ideas, but I suspect it has something to do with usefulness.
Adding a penny to your two ... Penrose seems to be that very rare scientist who combines extremely high intelligence, feel (he writes of Einstein's "instinct") and the courage to "go public" with what he doesn't know, and to take the latter as a challenge to discovery. There is without a doubt an intangible realm that plays an integral and highly meaningful part in physical reality. There are tons of evidence here, very little of which is acceptable to science, which I suppose should not be surprising given science's insistance upon tangibility. While the scientific and very human habit has been to insist that we do know, Penrose thinks and thinks and circles and circles and will not give in to that very great temptation, the Materialist temptation.
If the intangible is real, there would simply have to be some operative interface between it and the brain, and to look for it makes all kinds of scientific sense, to me at least.
My take is also that whether or not Penrose is aware of it, and I think he probably is, he leaves open the scientific door to mysticism, which he seems to believe and I would agree can be approached from the scientific side. NDE, and other heretofore "verboten" phenomena, may thus become legitimate subjects of scientific study. I believe they will, with time. All IMHO, Alamo-Girl.
Better even than a description of John Edwards' audience. ;^)
Jeepers, this conversation reminds me a lot of the ones we've already had on observer, value and evolution.
This, from the same link Dictionary of Philosphy of Mind - ought to help clear things up:
The positivists defined the physical as that which can be described in the concepts of a language with an intersubjective observation basis. This could be called unity of science physicalism. It is the primary meaning of physicalism in the philosophy of science. Another type of physicalism might be called causal physicalism, the view that all causes are physical causes.
There is a lot of confusion in the philosophy of mind literature stemming from a tendency to take physicalism and materialism to be interchangeable.
The physicalist, in my view, does not leap to the conclusion before he has made the observation, i.e. is not philosophically prejudiced. That's why I call Penrose a true scientist.
I see Francis Crick as a materialist. He believes the physical realm is all that there is, e.g. his book The Astonishing Hypothesis says that the soul is physically in the brain.
I see Roger Penrose as a physicalist. He says that some (but not all) of the inquiry into consciousness is beyond science and he does not address unconsciousness.
I also believe Penrose is Platonist, at least concerning such things as the Mandelbrot set. As I recall, this is the ongoing dispute between him and Hawking - as it was between Einstein and Gödel, who I also believe was Platonist.
That DOES seem to place a premium in making sure that research and scholarship don't contradict any details in the Bible. Good luck.
Wolfram's beef is with the ability of natural selection to have any meaningful effect on variation beyond very simple gene-at-a-time systems.
Do you mean complex? I think what you are getting at is that the rules appear to us to be random when they are, fact, quite simple. There is no way to model the system from a top-down, macroscopic point of view, but only in a reductionist way, by teasing out the simple rules. However, the initial conditions can be random.
"Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness" -- Roger Penrose
He says that some (but not all) of the inquiry into consciousness is beyond science
"My own position is that the questions of the mind, though they lie uncomfortably with present-day scientific understanding, should not be regarded as being forever outside the realm of science." --Roger Penrose
Penrose believes it is beyond our current understanding of science. Few materialists would disagree with that. Penrose does not believe that it will always be so.
S'alright. We'll probably pick right up where we left off next time around anyway.
I really don't know how to answer your question, js1138 -- in principle. You be the judge:
Just in case you haven't seen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science, which was finally issued this year, here's a little sketch. Essentially, cellular automata are pictures of the output of computer programs. You load whatever instructions you want to test and let 'er rip. The output is graphical. So then you just watch what happens. In other words, you don't have a clue, going in, about what you're going to get as a result.
I don't know how this relates to chemistry (I know almost nothing about that discipline), except to say that it appears Wolfram's "new kind of science" stands the traditional approach of science on its head. The classical model of science makes an hypothesis, and then tests it. You know what you're looking for; the experiment is done to test whether it's "there" -- i.e., to validate or falsify the hypothesis.
What Wolfram is doing is simply saying, let's start, not with an hypothesis, but with a specification of initial conditions, and a set of instructions -- which could be anything from the simplest of computer programs, the digit sequence of pi, the distribution of primes, Fibonacci numbers, Turing machines, and so forth -- and just let the instruction set run through zillions of iterations. (Well, tens of millions....)
As mentioned, the output is graphical; so in effect, at the end of the day you have a "model" of an evolving system in pictorial form. Wolfram has modelled all kinds of things in this way, just about anything that came to his attention whose behavior could be described in digital processing terms. This information forms the instruction set of the program.
The really interesting thing is that, after something like 20 years of staying up all night fiddling with his programs and modelling whatever came to hand, he ended up with only 258 possible patterns -- his cellular automata -- of only four types or classes. The Class 4 type is of particular interest (apparently there are only 2 or 3 CAs of this type).
As a result of doing this kind of experiment, Wolfram surmises that systems that are not obviously simple (e.g., Class 1 or 2 CAs) are "computationally equivalent." Finally he has an hypothesis to test, which he did: He was able to successfully emulate a very high-level Turing machine with Rule 110. And he suspects that little crittur may be some kind of a "universal emulator."
As Wolfram puts it, "it is a general feature of class 4 cellular automata that with appropriate initial conditions they can mimic the behavior of all sorts of other systems."
He hopes that science can figure out ways to apply this insight in their respective disciplines.
It is quite possible to have a physical process that cannot be simulated.
I believe it will be possible to build electronic consciousness...
After mulling over these two statements, which may seem contradictory on the surface, I understand what you are saying.
My position might also seem contradictory (though it is not) - because I see profound underlying order in the physical realm, i.e. algorithm at inception. At the same time, I do not see the physical realm as all that there is.
So, IMHO, even if A.I. were to able to simulate consciousness (hard or soft) that would not be the same thing as actualizing a being.
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