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."
Exactly. But it is one that' commonly made.
Revisionism at its best.
The story actually starts with Vade waxing on about how jennyp had opined about doing what BCMDA described as happening on the other board(an evo masquerading as a creationist --- and vice versa). I replied that it was easy for the evos to do it as they are practiced in the art of misrepesentation. Lo and behold No-kin appears for the first time in about a year. He and Vade participate in a sham colloquy about mammaries(IIRC). During the sham presentation Junior entirely misrepresented a statement by No-kin which I used as an opportunity for further evidence of evo misrepresentation. It was at this point that No-kin supposedly did the dirty deed, described above in the style favored by the Pimp of Prose, Vade. My suspicions already aroused by the fortuitous appearance of the Vade shill, this reaction to a comment I had not posted to No-kin, and not in any way supportive of him in his waltz with the Pimp, satisfied me as to his ersatz status. I took the opportunity later to point that out. For a day or longer this little charade played out [Clack][Clack]. I was right. He was a phony. When No-kin first appeared about a year earlier, PatrickHenry commented that NK looked as if he had come out of central casting. Judge for yourself. Vade is misrepresenting the facts again. It was NK and Vade that were discussing evolution. Junior made a comment misrepresenting No-kin. I answered Junior. No-kin answered me. Vade and No-kin were dog-sniffing. The later "I am Sparticus" comments unmasks the "Solidarity over honesty" practitioners.
Road Runner still got away, no doubt.
An amusingly similar suggestion was made to me that the stars themselves spell out the name of God. However, the Coyote spilled a bucket of extra stars into the sky just to obscure things.
I realize you were being funny, there is however, something which I take seriously:
By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. – Psalms 33:6
The 36-member, international “Boomerang” (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geomagnetics) collaboration, led by Andrew Lange of Caltech and Paolo de Bernardis of the University of Rome, confirms that a plot of CMB strength peaks at a multipole value of about 197 (corresponding to CMB patches about one degree in angular spread), very close to what theorists had predicted for a cosmology in which the universe’s overall curvature is zero and the existence of cold dark matter is invoked… The shape of the observed pattern of temperature variations suggests that a disturbance very like a sound wave moving through air passed through the high- density primordial fluid and that the CMB map can be can be thought of as a sort of sonogram of the infant universe. (de Bernardis et al., Nature, 27 April 2000.)
Big Bang Evidence Found – 5/2/2001
“The early universe is full of sound waves compressing and rarefying matter and light, much like sound waves compress and rarefy air inside a flute or trumpet,” explained Paolo deBernardis of the University of Rome La Sapienza, one of the members of the Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics (BOOMERanG) team. “For the first time the new data show clearly the harmonics of these waves.”
Harmonics in the Early Universe – 6/5/2001
The MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations, which measure minute variations in the CMB, recently reported new results at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. All three agree remarkably about what the “harmonic proportions” of the cosmos imply: not only is the universe flat, but its structure is definitely due to inflation, not to topological defects in the early universe.
The results were presented as plots of slight temperature variations in the CMB that graph sound waves in the dense early universe. These high-resolution “power spectra” show not only a strong primary resonance but are consistent with two additional harmonics, or peaks...
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.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. – Genesis 1
In my view, harmonics at inception (big bang - God speaking) manifested the fields, which manifest geometry and dimension, and from there particles, energy, etc. This is as close to a "copyright notice" as I have seen.
Cosmological Patterns and Galaxy Biasing (pdf)
Stability and Size of Galaxies from Planck’s Constant (PDF)
Really? In spite of all our knowledge, intelligence and technology no one has yet been able to create as much as a single new gene that performs a single new function. We alone have some 30,000 such genes.
Evolutionists deny they are Communists but they sure act like them! They love to lie, they love to rewrite history. Vade's specialty (besides insults) is to claim that something was refuted hundreds of times - on some other thread which he never seems to be able to cite.
While he was apparently exonerated from being no-kin-to-monkeys, the person was found to be an evolutionist posting as an opponent of evolution so that the evolutionists could make fun of opponents. Not only is this using more than one account an utter violation of forum rules (which do not seem to bother the evos as their constant abusive behavior shows) but it is also a totally despicable tactic (also often used by Communists - agents provocateurs) and a great example that nothing is too low or too despciable for them. Your hypocritical statement above I could call a new low for evolutionists but unfortunately there have been so many from you and your friends that it is hard to rate them.
In other words, you have no refutation of the truth and cannot think up a better lie. I have the posts somewhere. I learned from you. I will post the entire exchange. I believe you and others had the original thread pulled.
As to you standing by your statements, that does not make them more accurate. In fact, it makes them very suspect.
Aaah the 'I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinksy' defense. I am sure that you will get your ministers (your fellow evos) to all come out and lie for you since they too do not have any problem with lying.
That sure is the evolutionist credo. I remember quite well a thread about a year ago where somewhere in my response I missed typing a 'no'. The evolutionists by knee jerk reaction and totally without thought started attacking my statement (and because of the missing 'no' actually supporting my position). I let it go on for some hundred posts and you are your friends were having a great time 'refuting' me, until I finally pointed out my mistake.
Just because the thread is gone from FR doesn't mean it is lost forever. Think about it.
And there are still extant copies of the pieces of the New Testament dating to the 2nd Century. The NT by far the most reliable record of antiquity.
Cognitive science tells us that one hundred billion neurons connected by one trillion synapes, given the flexible combinatorial majesty of the recursive, modular programming of the mind, can account for every image and thought process, including all dream states, that are represented in the mind. The portfolio making that case has begun to bulge noticeably in recent decades as the reductionists earn their pay.
But to my mind the uncanny universality of the theme present in the story you relate tells us something astounding about the material world, something resistant to reductionism. What is it? Why are these archetypes so powerful across all cultures? Is it really a mere evolutionary mechanism?
There is a leak between the material and the non-material, somewhere under QM and near the bottom of Mandelbrots fractals. Spirit does not "exist" in the sense the hardcore materialists expect, but it connects us nonetheless to a beyond, and touches our mind in dreams.
js1138, sometimes I wonder whether the A.I. researchers have got their model wrong. They seem to have settled on the idea that mind is merely an epiphenomenon, or by-product, of the brain's physical processing. But what if this assumption is wrong? That would mean that they could understand each and every detail about the way the brain works and still not be able to isolate mind, consciousness. But you need to have consciousness in order to have intelligence, artificial or natural. My hunch is that the brain is the instrument used by consciousness. Of course, the brain does a whole lot of lower-level processing to keep the body functioning properly. But mind does not appear to me to be "controlled" by the brain at all.
I could be wrong about this; but if I'm right, then A.I. research may be barking up the wrong tree. And so I think it'll be a while before we have to worry about "cyborgs taking over the world." :^)
If it is, then one wonders what purpose this "evolutionary mechanism" would serve. Why do all cultures of all times "select" for this archetype? You wrote:
There is a leak between the material and the non-material, somewhere under QM and near the bottom of Mandelbrots fractals. Spirit does not "exist" in the sense the hardcore materialists expect, but it connects us nonetheless to a beyond, and touches our mind in dreams.
I think that is a much more rational expectation than natural selection. Thank you so much for writing, beckett, and for your kind words.
Hey! Ask Physicist! I was at his house posting along side him while G3K was posting!
Nope I have never been that bored!!! LOL!
I just fainted for a moment, while trying to visualize that exciting scene.
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