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."
You, as usual, completely ignored my other points.
In other words, you have excuses, not an answer, you have rhetoric, not science.
Because parts of a theory cannot be explained yet, does this immediately disprove a theory?
A theory to be legitimate has to provide the best explanation for the facts. The above is a pretty elementary fact, known long before Darwin was born. It is also a pretty obvious fact that the change is quite big. It is also pretty obvious that a species to continue to 'evolve' has to continue to reproduce. So I consider the above a very conclusive rebuttal of the theory of evolution. Further, I have never seen a discussion of this problem by evolutionists in the literature (certainly not by Darwin), on the internet, or on these pages. It seems that evolutionists think that if they ignore the problem it will go away - which is what evolutionists have been doing since I first posted this question. It will not go away.
Made up situations do not prove anything. There are also many people who will say they believe in evolution because they have never really looked at it. I think one of the basis of liberalism is moral relativism and this is very much a part of evolutionary theory. Ideas have consequences and the tendency of evolution is towards liberalism.
New Point #3: I've learned a lot since joining this thread, and the following statement derives from this attained knowledge. If a large number of RATIONAL men believe something to be true, it is irrational to conclude with complete authority that they are incorrect unless you can provide absolute and compelling evidence which destroys the theory. This is true for religion, and right now, it holds true for evolution.
The argument from authority does not work if those who claim authority do not have any rational refutation to the point being made.
Let's use your line in a little make-believe conversation between Newton and the Pope during his time.
Pope: So I see you have a new little theory.
Newton: Yup. It is called gravity. It attracts objects together based on mass and distance. It's a very easy formula, actually, look.
Pope: Well, it seems to have a discrepancy here in the motion of Mercury. Can you explain how your theory and reality don't quite coincide? Do you have an answer?
Newton: No but it's a start. It isn't perfect yet!
Pope: In other words, you have excuses, not an answer, you have rhetoric, not science. If you cannot explain everything about the motion of planets with your new theory, then throw it out. It seems you have a problem of planetary proportions! Hahahaha!
Newton: Hahahaha! (Newton looks into the camera and shrugs with his hands out. A muted trumpet plays "Waah, Waah, Waah, Waaaaaa!". Freeze frame, roll credits).
The only thing made up there is the Starbucks. Insert Free Republic instead. The person is me.
Against that, one No-Kin-To-Monkeys violated the sacred rule of "Thou shalt not bitch-slap a fellow creo." At the time, embroiled in argument with the receiver of the rebuff, I simply thought that the behavior showed that intellectual honesty in a creo was possible after all. What happened next was a revelation. A howl went up from slappee that No-Kin was obviously an impostor.
That proved right. Accused of being that impostor, I authorized the mods to check. I was innocent but somebody else presumably got yelled at. If you're ever going to impersonate a creo, remember "Solidarity over honesty."
Well maybe not 'prove' anything. But the use of parables can be a handy teaching tool. They can also be used to show another where he is at fault without obviously and personally attacking him or her. Somebody else did the same in history, can't think of the name, um... Can you help me?
Agreed. But we can certainly put an upper limit on the information content,. If we say the number of combinations in DNA is 4^N, where N is the number of base pairs, then the entropy of the specific sequence can be no more than k*N*ln 4 lower than total randomness. As I've noted before, this is a thermodynamically tiny quantity; for 10^9 base pairs, it is of the order of 10^-14 J/mol K, or equivalent to the order produced by freezing about a 10 femtograms of water. If the sequence is not unique in terms of phenotype (which, as you note, it will not be), the negative entropy will be lower than the number computed above, but it cannot be higher.
We could also argue that not all the order in the cell resides in the genome. After all, a genome cannot produce a new organism unless it has the entire apparatus of the cell to work with. We could put an upper bound on this by ordinary thermodynamic measurements - just by burning the organism, for example - and again it appears the negative entropy is absolutely minuscule.
It's a sobering thought, but the human genome does not appear to be particularly complex. The Bible, I'd warrant, has nearly as much information content as any of our genomes.
I agree that we most likely do not need randomness to do probability, statistics or physics!
The reason I’m circling this like a buzzard is that it is important in my hypothesis that algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design. In other words, should we discover information content at inception (either big bang or abiogenesis) – then I must have some way of knowing it is algorithmically irreducible or my hypothesis is just so much hot air (not that anyone else cares, but I do.)
Chaitin refers to Champernowne in his article, Randomness & Complexity in Pure Mathematics. In speaking of algorithmic randomness, Chaitin says that Champernowne’s is the first example of a normal real number and “it follows from the fact that the halting probability Omega is algorithmically irreducible information, that this
0 < Omega = Sump halts 2-|p| < 1is normal in any base.” He explains this later in the section as follows:
Irreducible Mathematical Information
0 < Omega = Sump halts 2-|p| < 1
Émile Borel --- normal reals
Champernowne
.01234567891011121314...99100101...
Okay, so what have we got? We have a rather simple mathematical object that completely escapes us. Omega's bits have no structure. There is no pattern, there is no structure that we as mathematicians can comprehend. If you're interested in proving what individual bits of this number at specific places are, whether they're 0 or 1, reasoning is completely useless. Here mathematical reasoning is irrelevant and can get nowhere. As I said before, the only way a formal axiomatic system can get out these results is essentially just to put them in as assumptions, which means you're not using reasoning. After all, anything can be demonstrated by taking it as a postulate that you add to your set of axioms. So this is a worst possible case---this is irreducible mathematical information. Here is a case where there is no structure, there are no correlations, there is no pattern that we can perceive.
Unless you see a flaw in my reasoning, I’ll use Chaitin for a definition of algorithmic irreducible information.
should have read
Unless you see a flaw in my reasoning, I’ll use Chaitin for a definition of algorithmically irreducible information.
I was just fixing to add something to my previous post for the lurkers who may be following our discussion.
The way I worded my post to you, it sounds as though algorithmically irreducible information would support my hypothesis algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design.
To the contrary, it would falsify it; but every hypothesis must have a means to falsify (Popper.) IOW, I must have a way to show that information content cannot be reduced by algorithm, i.e. that it is truly random.
In this scenario, at inception - where nothing (null) precedes, whatever is must be truly random - if it contains algorithm (step by step instruction), then there must be an intelligent designer.
For the lurkers: if my hypothesis is falsified, it does not constitute proof for or against an intelligent designer - it would only show that my hypothesis is no good.
You might find it curious that some Kabbalists believe our DNA is our "name" and the Bible is one of God's names, as He is revealing Himself to us.
I finished reading it and naturally went looking for Chaitin's response, which I found at Paradoxes of Randomness - Complexity Vol. 7, No. 5, May/June 2002, pp. 14-21:
However, you can prove all kinds of nice mathematical theorems about this Omega number. Even though it's a specific real number, it really mimics independent tosses of a fair coin. So for example you can prove that 0's and 1's happen in the limit exactly fifty percent of the time, each of them. You can prove all kinds of statistical properties, but you can't determine individual bits!
So this is the strongest version I can come up with of an incompleteness result...
Actually, in spite of this, Cristian Calude, Michael Dinneen and Chi-Kou Shu at the University of Auckland have just succeeded in calculating the first 64 bits of a particular Omega number. The halting probability Omega actually depends on the choice of computer or programming language that you write programs in, and they picked a fairly natural one, and were able to decide which programs less than 85 bits in size halt, and from this to get the first 64 bits of this particular halting probability.
This work by Calude et al. is reported on page 27 of the 6 April 2002 issue of the British science weekly New Scientist, and it's also described in Delahaye's article in the May 2002 issue of the French monthly Pour la Science, and it'll be included in the second edition of Calude's book on Information and Randomness, which will be out later this year.
But this doesn't contradict my results, because all I actually show is that an N-bit formal axiomatic theory can't enable you to determine substantially more than N bits of the halting probability. And by N-bit axiomatic theory I mean one for which there is an N-bit program for running through all possible proofs and generating all the theorems. So you might in fact be able to get some initial bits of Omega.
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