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."
No. I'm not saying that only that which is observable is real but that only of that which is observable we can know to be real. For instance, a parallel universe may exist but since we cannot observe it (neither directly nor indirectly) we cannot know that it exists.
Also, it should be quite diffcult to determine whether object 'A' which may exist but cannot be observed (neiter directly nor indirectly) is better or worse than object 'B' which also may exist but simply cannot be observed.
And how many things are there that may exist after all but cannot be observed?
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?
And how do you know that all these scientists are atheists? Or is it simply that label them as atheists just because you don't like their work?
Cloning exists since there are identical twins and abortion exists only since Roe vs. Wade. Oops! No wait, it doesn't. It's almost as old as humanity.
Hmm... human stem cell research bad? - I don't think so, but that's just my humble opinion.
What is this - a weak insinuatiion that Christianity is akin to the Taliban?
Heh? Where did I say Taliban? I didn't say it nor did I want to insinnuate something like that. You seem to see things which aren't there.
Why is it that these Christian men, and not some atheistic scientists, were the ones to make these discoveries - was it dumb luck?
No, I'd rather say that if you were an atheist in those times it was healthier to stay in the closet. So if there were scientists who did not believe in a god they wouldn't have made it public since atheism was a thought-crime extraordinaire in most of the Christian world as late as the early 19th century.
Only then people and here especially scientists didn't hide their atheism from the public. Today many scientists (and especially the top notch scientists) are atheists. Yet they still continue to do science and make discoveries even if they are not Christians or adherents of an other religion.
An atheist, however, beginning from himself, has no reason to believe the universe is ordered and comprehensible, does he?
The strawman atheist you build may have a reason to believe this but alas, he's just a strawman. So an atheist, beginning from himself, doesn't have to believe this. He may believe that this universe is ordered and comprehensible because there are no gods who meddle with it and work in misterious ways. Do I have to repeat this again in an other post?
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.
I don't deny any historical facts. The belief that our universe is ordered and comprehensible can be very useful if you want to do science but the reason why you hold that belief (there is a god who made it so or there are no gods who meddle with it) is absolutely irrelevant.
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.
Please tell me WHAT is the supernatural. Do you have a model of it? And how can we tell whether something is of supernatural origin or not? Is there something of which can be said that it isn't of supernatural origin with a high degree of certainty? The natural is bound by certain rules, the supernatural isn't.
So if you include the supernatural (even if it does exist), the universe is no longer ordered (there is no known way to determine the laws of the supernatural) nor comprehensible (how do you want to comprehend something that you can't even observe, neither directly nor indirectly?).
Evolution has been observed and we also have a lot of evidence in form of fossils that it happened in the past and the fossil record points to a common ancestor. So yes, evolution has been observed directly as well as indirectly. And so-called micro-evolution is also evolution and creationists still haven't presented any compelling evidence of this ominous barrier that prevents micro-evolution from becoming macro-evolution. The only thing one hears is moving goal posts since in some creationists circles the fact that speciation can occur has been accepted but of course it is only micro-evolution and anything beyond speciation cannot happen because of this barrier that hasn't been shown to exist.
Abiogenesis is a hypothesis for the origins of life based on the observation that complex organic molecules do exist and that rather complex compounds (usually organic) can form from simpler molecules. So the only thing you can say about abiogenesis is not that it is chemically impossible, only improbable. However, improbable doesn't mean impossible.
Now can you say the same about the supernatural? Is a supernatural hypothesis probable or improbable? How improbable does a natural hypothesis have to be in order for a supernatural one to be more probable? Is there an accepted value for this probability?
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.
Awwww!! Now this is pretty dense. I think Physicist explained this ad nauseam: time, matter and all the rest of that bunch only make sense within our universe.
And again, what other universe do you know of that is different from ours because it "just happened" instead of being created by your god? Do you know a mechanism that prevents a universe to be like ours if no god created it?
So I don't know whether this universe was created by a god or not but as long as I don't have evidence in form of at least an other universe that was demonstrably not created I won't assume the existence of a god. Does Occam's Razor ring a bell?
Yes, that's true, but we're going a bit off-road. I started this sub-thread by stating that Penrose was a materialist regarding the issue of consciousness, which is firmly a question of (Penrose's) epistemology.
My epistemology is firmly materialist, but my metaphysics is not. I believe that there exist an infinitude of objective and universal Truths, which all of existence (and all mathematical systems) is inexorably bound to satisfy, and out of which all material is constructed. The sum of these inviolable Truths is what I have in mind when I talk of God. My view is rigidly Deistic, because for God to intervene in the universe would violate the laws of Nature, and thereby violate the Truth, clearly an impossibility.
(Note, however, that these Truths are not in themselves physical, so I'm still not clear on the "physical but not material" concept.)
The term materialism in taken to mean the belief that everything that actually exists is material, or physical.
Whereas the term physicalism means the belief that everything that actually exists is physical, or material. ;^)
I suggest you give it up and let them live with their preconceptions (and invincible ignorance) about the "spiritual" nature of consciousness.
When philosophy spun off what used to be called "natural philosophy" as "science," it divorced itself from reality forever. What remains is less Twilight Zone speculation as much as idle chit-chat.
There must be a lot of material out there written about information in biology that I haven't read... I don't think the field of information theory has progressed far enough in relation to biology [to make definitive statements about the information contained in a particular sequence of DNA]
The width and breadth of research is mind boggling! So far, I have discovered three areas of research. One area is to enhance the continuing efforts in Artificial Intelligence by exploring the genetic code. Another is direct analysis and modeling of the theory of evolution itself.
The Genetics Algorithm Archive
International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation – ISGEC
All of that is quite engaging, but the third area is the most intriguing to me. It explores the information content of the genetic code itself, and therefore IMHO can tell us a lot about origins. At the request of edsheppa, I posted some information about that kind of research at 4009 and 4140. To make it easier for you and for the lurkers, I repeat the links and some of the excerpts below:
The belief that life is ‘written into the laws of nature is sometimes called biological determinism (Shapiro, 1986). In its most extreme form, as advocated for example by Sidney Fox (Fox, 1988), it asserts that the laws of the universe are cunningly rigged to coax life into being from lifeless chemicals, by favouring the production of just those molecules that life needs. On this manifestly teleological view, life’s information content derives from the physical laws that generate the informational molecules. This view is hard to sustain, since the information content, as measured algorithmically (Chaitin, 1990), of the known laws of physics at least, is demonstrably low (Yockey, 1992). That is why crystals, which are determined by those laws, have low information content, being just regular arrays of atoms. By contrast, DNA is a random string of atoms - the ‘aperiodic crystal famously predicted by Schrödinger (1944) - and so has high algorithmic information content; it is then hard to see how such an entity could be a product of law alone. In this respect it is worth noting that although the backbone structure of DNA is determined by the laws of physics and chemistry, the precise sequence of nucleotides the ‘letters of the genetic alphabet are not. There are no chemical bonds between successive nucleotides; chemistry is indifferent to the sequence chosen...
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 controller’s 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 can’t 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 Eigen’s 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
Entropy and Biological Science
Molecular Information Theory and the Theory of Molecular Machines
Today, we are discovering that nature is very mathematical, very methodical, very logical. To me, this is a strong indication that our entire world is ruled completely by mathematical equations and predictions - and not only that, but that humans have the capability to sort it all out; they already have come a long way. It is quite conceivable to suspect that humans will figure out the ultimate equations that are at the basis of everything…
While it would certainly be fitting, "I know you are, but what am I" just doesn't seem satisfactory somehow. So we'll try it this way: If God's laws are arbitrary, how can they possibly be objective? Not only that, but who, exactly, is the final arbiter of what God says this absolute morality is? You? The Pope? How come the Christian god gets to be the source of absolute morality? Why not fair time to Budda, Allah, Shiva, or Ra? Shouldn't we just present all possible alternatives and let the kids make up their own minds?
Because "God" is an arbitrary concept upon which no two people will agree, moral must be objectively defined without resorting to mysticism.
It starts with the premise "All people are equal." Not, of course, in terms of abilities, strengths and so forth, but in terms of moral actions and rights. Everything else can be logically derived.
Your system of morality must necessarily start with "There is a God, and this is what I say he says, and no, I can't prove it to you so you're going to have to accept it whether you like it or not." Sorry, too many arbitrary terms to be objective.
The terms materialism and physicalism are taken on these threads according to their respective meaning in philosophy. From the Dictionary of Philosophy of the Mind. (emphasis mine)
materialism - The view that everything that actually exists is material, or physical. Many philosophers and scientists now use the terms `material' and `physical' interchangeably (for a version of physicalism distinct from materialism, see physicalism). Characterized in this way, as a doctrine about what exists, materialism is an ontological, or a metaphysical, view; it is not just an epistemological view about how we know or just a semantic view about the meaning of terms.
physicalism - The view that everything that is real is, in some sense, really physical.
For lurkers, epistemology is the study of our method of acquiring knowledge.
Unless a poster specifies that they are a materialist (epistemologically speaking), the term materialist will most assuredly be taken ontologically or metaphysically --- and not just epistemologically, and thus may quite likely lead to accusations of atheism, ill will, etc.
Conversely, if a poster specifies that he is a physicalist, no ill will can follow. The physicalist has not presumed that the material world is all that there is, but he has not ruled it out either.
Dealing with the perceptions of the terms that we use can be mighty annoying, but I think it is worth the effort. I'm trying to follow that rule of thumb by being careful to to use the full term theory of evolution when appropriate
I don't feel very sophisticated in this particular discussion, but I would say that when anything reaches the threshold of "isness" it is material. to me this is just semantics. Physicist speaks of being a Deist. I suppose I am a monist, if that term is not obsolete. Of course, quantum theory allows matter to embody what used to be called dualism. The difference between philosophical dualism and quantum theory is that quantum duality can be observed and studied.
Now I'm going to take a nap before I drown in my own BS.
Since my hypothesis is algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design - I’m very much interested in self-organizing complexity. In that regard, Rocha’s work is especially engaging because he suggests how self organizing systems might evolve the symbols necessary for syntactic autonomy!
I've been off researching since reading your post, trying to figure this out myself - but it appears I will need your help:
Random objects may be highly structured, in fact more so than non-random ones. There's no contradiction between Chaitin and Wolfram here.
Mathematically speaking, “structure” doesn’t comport with what I understand to be the definition of algorithmic randomness Randomness and Complexity in Pure Mathematics – Chaitin - i.e. algorithmically irreducible information.
I also was under the impression that the consequence of initial random states was still at issue with Cellular Automata. Perhaps I misread. Twenty Problems in the Theory of Cellular Automata - i.e. problem 10, What is the correspondence between cellular automata and stochastic systems?
For lurkers following our discussion: Toward A Mathematical Definition Of "Life" - Chaitin (ResearchIndex)
The definition of materialism cautioned that it is not taken to be semantic (emphasis mine):
Oh, for the love of...! Don't you have anything better to do?
Conversely, if a poster specifies that he is a physicalist, no ill will can follow. The physicalist has not presumed that the material world is all that there is, but he has not ruled it out either.
After all this time in these threads, I've only just now been exposed to this wafer-thin distinction of terms. I've known that "materialist" was a philosophical school that includes atheism, and I've resisted that label when it's been tossed at me, but way too many creationists assault folks on my side with labels like "darwinist atheist materialist humanist dogmatist" and it's just too much bother to correct them. I once -- only once -- told someone that two could play that game, and I could label him a "creationist socialist sodomite cannibalist" or some such collection of terms. I guess I didn't make the point very well, because someone complained to the mods and got the post pulled.
Anyway, as your post illustrates, when someone advocates a position like evolution, there's an unfortunate tendency to automatically attach to that person a load of unrelated ideas. This is a source of considerable ill will.
In my experience, any defense of materialism is more likely to lead to expressions of ill will, rather than accusations of same.
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