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."
Of course there is - a set of organisms which can reproduce and produce viable offspring. This is the only objective view of species. Evolutionists have tried to make up many other definitions so that they can subjectively claim proof for their theory. It is part of the definition game which absent evidence they use to create evidence.
As to the problem of classification, most of them are pretty well set and they express deep biological differences between species. Plants are not just different becuase they are able to photosynthesize. They require a totally different features top to bottom to accomplish this and thus are quite different from anything in the animal kingdom. Your attempt to discredit science in this manner needs to be noted. The only way you can support evolution is by throwing away science and saying that 'the facts are whatever we want them to be'.
Escher castles are designed, one might say meticuously, in fact, but I doubt one will ever be made.
Which of course is an element which works for stasis instead of evolution. There are other elements known which silence mutated genes as well as elements which fight viral and other intruders. Organisms protect themselves against genetic change in varied ways.
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.
This is totally false. There are numerous transposons in humans. If this behavior was common, the amount of mutations in humans would be enormous and we would be watching before our eyes the transformation of the human species. The fact of the matter is that we know almost nothing about what these transposons do and have never seen it induce any sort of favorable transformation in any living thing. We do know that the activation of transposons is tightly controlled and that many of them are very specific as to the sites on which they transpose to.
This is not so cut and dried as you like to pretend. Right Wing is correct. Distinct speciation is a byproduct of the desire of academic zoologists' to work with convenient bounderies, it is not a reflection of natural events. In the real world, speciation is relative, gradual, and unevenly spread. One may detect relative speciation in the real world--the degree to which one individual might be likely to produce offspring with another, but one will never detect a clean line of demarcation. Mixed critters of many stripes have produced offspring with various attenuated degrees of viability. Cats&dogs, camels&llamas, sheep&goats, horses&donkeys, libertarians&republicans.
Pertinent to this discussion it should be noted that the two 'new' phyllum are of the Cambrian period. Thus, new discoveries continue to confirm that there have not been any new phyla since the Cambrian and thus evolution, totally contrary to the hopes of its adherents, continues to be disproven by new discoveries.
Yup, that is the problem, and even Darwin recognized it and agreed that it would totally disprove evolution. Gould, after seeing that there was no possible explanation for it, split completely with Darwinism on account of it. There is to this day no viable explanation for the multitude of phyla that arose within just 5 million years during the Cambrian explosion with no possible ancestors at all.
From here, we can see some of the phyla coming from some of the earlier-existing phyla.
Of course the 'here' is from a nobody best known at home at dinner time. Even then, making the most favorable ASSUMPTIONS possible, he still cannot even come close to giving a possible ancestry for the vast majority of the phyla. In fact, better accredited evolutionists cannot even agree in how to classify most of the phyla into groups let alone figure out any possible ancestors for them even though evolutionists have been trying for 150 years to do just that.
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.
Amazing how you twist yourself trying to contradict me! Now you are saying that there is no evidence for mutations being due to selection pressure! I can agree with that. However that evolution CLAIMS that a Malthusian struggle for life is the source of evolutionary change cannot be denied. That such struggle for life has been scientifically disproven also cannot be denied (and your assertion gives further evidence for my statement). Thanks for the help.
There is no mollecular clock, period, end of story. There is no DNA to which to compare existing DNA to DNA from billions of years ago so what evolutionists are claiming is based on using a one inch ruler to measure the distance from NY to LA when they do not know where LA is. It is total nonsense and more made up evidence based on nothing except the desperation of evolutionists.
Funny you should mention the above! Scientists consider the eukaryotes, prokaryotes and the archaea as not being in any way related to each other and not having descended in any way from each other. Evolutionists can also not explain the progression towards multi-celled organisms in any way. It is an enormous change for which they have neither evidence of how it happened nor even a possible explanation for it. So to cite these as showing that the Cambrian does not disprove evolution is pretty shameless.
A useful way to think about FSM's, as opposed to more powerful parsing devices, is that an FSM knows instantly when it has succeeded or failed, without the aid of a memory store.
Here's my favorite chart on the subject:
Language Class -- Chomsky level -- recognition automata recursively enumerable -- 0 -- Turing Machine context-sensitive -- 1 -- linearly bound TM context-free -- 2 -- push down automata regular -- 3 -- Finite State MachineTokenizers are generally FSM's/regular grammars, commercial compilers are generally PDA's/CFG's, and semantic processing is, well, beyond my ken, formally speaking.
Not correct. The recent ribosomal genetic clock calculations merely suggest that a single commmon ancester is not looking like such a hot bet anymore. That is a far cry from "not being in any way related to each other".
BTW, have you ever written a compiler or interpreter?
Several of the examples I offered up do not fit into any of these four catagories. Our universe could be a balancing shadow of some more important thing similar to a universe, and whose laws merely reflect an act of dumping to maintain stasis in the xverses--in other words, we're a sewer plant. Our universe could be tied in an endless loop by, amongst other means, time's beginning and end being identical events.
And, at any rate, none of the explanations you have ruled out are, in fact, categorically ruled out.
1) It is a highly defensible position (in fact, an impregnable one) that "It COULD be an illusion", it could be a joint illusion, it could be an illusion created by creatures mutually illusioned into existence by each other. (By the way, what is the difference between Berkeley's suggestion that all the universe is an illusion, and that God whopped up the universe out of nothing? ie, we're God's illusion.)
2) Of course something can come from nothing. Positrons and electrons poop into existence out of nothing all the time. The casimir effect depends on the stochastic reliability of this phenomenon.
3) Of course the universe could wind down forever. No presently known laws related to time, entropy, or anything else rule this out.
Yup--they don't let you graduate from Berkeley's CS department unless you can generate parsers at a moment's notice, and throw a frisbee through a rotating tire suspended on a rope at 20 yards.
In the unix world there is a set of tools called lex and yacc which generate tokenizers and simple parsers from their formal language descriptions. While I was in school, I spent several summers working for silicon foundaries generating parsers for test generation languages customized to specific chips using lex and yacc, and can testify to their utility.
Generating special purpose languages for specific industrial applications using lex and yacc is a powerfully economical idea that doesn't get nearly enough air time, in my humble opinion. It could solve a lot of industrial control problems that presently go begging.
From a materialistic point of view (the point of view of evolution) there is no essential difference between living things and non living things. In fact, materialists claim that living things arose from non-living things so (to materialists) they are essentially the same. Since they are (again according to materialists) have the same properties it is not unfair to ask that if one can see design in non-living things that the same criteria can be used in the case of living things. The argument of intelligent design thus boils down to that if one can easily discern that a complex, interrelated, purposeful object was designed in the non living sphere of things, that such criteria can be equally well used to determine design in living things.
Since evolutionists claim that randomness is the source of change, it is legitimate to ask what chances there are for so many random changes to have occurred? The criteria which Dembski uses is that if there is only one chance in 10^100 that something happened, then it is fair to say that it was intelligently designed. Unlike what evolutionists claim, such chances can be scientifically determined with our present knowledge. The chance of arriving at say a correct DNA string for a certain gene can be easily estimated by using the 4 possible codes to the power of the length of the DNA bases of the gene (ie a gene of 900 DNA bases which is average to small has a chance of occurring at random at one chance in 4^900). This can be tested in the lab by making substitutions and seeing what changes would allow it to properly function. Such tests have been made and continue to be made and the possible substitutions are few and far between. It would be extremely generous to allow the example gene to have one chance in 2^900 of arising at random - which is a virtual impossibility. When one considers all the numerous absolutely new genes that would have had to arise totally at random to create just the 1.5 million known species, one has to see that evolution is totally impossible because as I say, a chance of a near impossible event can be attributed to luck, a chance of numerous nearly impossible events occurring is totally impossible and a ridiculous assertion.
How many times you gonna sing this song? If you and Dembski don't know EXACTLY how something occured, you don't know how to quantitatively express the state-space, and the selection criteria, which means you don't know diddle-e-squat about what the computed probability was.
Yes, a person needs to learn the letters of the alphabet before they can recognize handwriting. However, once they have learned the letters they can recognize them even though they are in different fonts, styles, etc. through the human ability of abstraction. A computer cannot do that. It can not abstract. Essentially it can only compare to equality. For this reason hand writing recognition in spite of many years of attempts (and humongous programs written for it) cannot yet properly tell the correct letters. Humans can see the forms in things, the abstractions, computers cannot make abstractions. Even after decades of trying to finesse through huge programs and numerous rules how to tell the letters, they still need to be taught a particular person's handwriting before they can function.
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