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."
Being a chess player myself, I think the above is true, but it is not relevant to a purported historical, impersonal evolution of the cosmos, life, and intelligence because such an evolution has no goal or purpose. Where there is provision of a goal, there must be a provider. There is no Provider in a non-teleological universe.
Cordially,
For quite a few posts, you and other Freepers have expressed a great deal of concern as to how far Artificial Intelligence has come - and how far it can go. I tried once before to hail Freeper tortoise to give us some "inside" information. He is an expert in the field and on a previous thread spoke of some recent breakthrough.
Living systems are neither logical nor rational, nor digital. Attempting to simulate them on computers is a tough row to hoe.
They are certainly peculiar, but I'm not ready to agree with you on this because we have only begun to look into some of these areas - especially, the information content of the genetic code. I'm not sure how the research will classify it, though I would expect it to be analog and not digital and not rational.
I confess to flirting with the guys to avoid the decollater. I'm not tough skinned and those paper cuts hurt like crazy.
BTW, Kuiper Belt objects are still formed from the stuff from the original planetary disk.
Exactly! Thank you so much for explaining it so well. Hugs!
What is the plane? I would say that Jupiter determines the plane and Earth is farther off than Mars is. The point being that you can line up the planets except for Mercury and Pluto on a fairly even plane. The same planets that are in a planar arrangement also have circular orbits. So it is easy to see that they could have accreted. The question not answered is how could something that caused the Moon by the mechanism described have formed by accretion?
Danger to cells comes in the form of stresses like nutrient deficiencies, temperature changes, or direct damage to cellular components. Repair systems and chaperones are ever present in cells to fix these problems. In bacteria, for instance, a set of genes called the SOS operon is devoted to the stress response. The SOS response shuts down cell division and ramps up DNA repair. It doesn't initiates mutations, it actually repairs damage that could result in a mutation.
In eukaryotes, there is evidence that transposons are activated in the presence of UV DNA damage. Enzymes promoting this activation can be induced by stress. Activated transposons freely insert elsewhere in the genome and cause major mutations, not, necessarily, causing a proper response to the inducing stress. This occurs mostly in somatic cells, but of late, evidence is accumulating that retrotransposition is involved in major remodeling of the genome in evolution.
The damage repair mechanisms are an excellent example of information content, the cell having the ability to respond to stress. But the second mechanism, retrotransposition, is a regular goldmine word for finding information on the state-of-the-art. My first 'catch' was this: Spliceosome-mediated RNA trans -splicing in gene therapy and genomics.
That is because it was chosen that way. The majority of the mass of the solar system is contained in two bodies, the sun and Jupiter(~71% of the planetary mass). They determine the plane.
That should make Monty very happy: Build a Better Crackpot
Why? About 300 new species are found every year. New families are found, new taxa, even new phyla (Cycliophora, Loricifera). We haven't discovered half of what's extant, let alone all of what's extinct. Most of the newly discovered organisms are on the small side. It wasn't long ago that a type of phytoplankton, Procholorococcus, was discovered. It makes up well over a third of all phytoplankton! Ocean sediments and other unusual environments yield new species all the time. Obviously, none of these have representatives in the fossil record.
Thank you for the information. I guess the fuzziness of the catagories just goes to demonstrate that all life is related, and there are a lot more "intermediate" forms than some people will admit.
The differences in body plans, even when looking at a micro-level instead of a coarse level of the fossil record from a distance of 500 million years is still large. One of the reasons, I suspect, why we don't see such novel changes in bodyplan is because of developmental canalization. There are only so many ways to skin a cat, so to speak, and there are only so many ways an organism can develop from a single cell to a reproductive adult.
The problem is alleged to be that all the phyla appear at once from nowhere and that this has never happened since. A phylum is a "body plan," an objective thing instantly recognizable.
I have problems with practically all of the assumptions. From here, we can see some of the phyla coming from some of the earlier-existing phyla. Even where fossil transitionals are lacking, the Cambrian phyla are similar in size, overall complexity, and lack of derived features. They are what you would expect of animals not that far diverged from a common ancestry. Later post-divergence history created greater differences than were apparent at the time. There were, for instance, no jawed fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, land plants, flowering plants, or insects in the Cambrian. All that is "later divergence."
The initial appearances of all the known phyla in the fossil record are actually all over the map, not all at once in or before the Cambrian. It may be that more of them actually appeared in the Cambrian than can can now be shown, but that's not a given.
A phylum is not so objective that you can find just one number for how many there are and what they are. Morton's article linked earlier cites one line of sponges as having evolved a new body plan but not being assigned a new phylum because they are detectably still sponges.
The taxonomic bins--all of them--are arbitrary, except that in creationism the walls of some bins must be argued as having an underlying discontinuity in common descent. Similarly, some forever-flexible number of fossil record gaps are argued as reflecting an underlying gap in the continuity of life forms.
Wrong. A particular gene may mutate. If a mutation is helpful it will probably be retained. If it is deleterious, it will probably be selected against. If it is confers no advantage or disadvantage, it may or may not hang around. That mutations are a response to selection pressure has not been established.
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