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."
I think the point is that a reasonably smart person can read many other people's handwriting without retraining. Not to mention excentric and arty fonts.
If you bring logic to the dinner table, you have to eat it. If you tell me that God is outside of space and time, you violate #1.
If ID is describing itself as science, shouldn't it be trying to falsify itself? Isn't that th way science behaves? Shouldn't ID be actively proposing research that would test the probabilities?
Of course there is - a set of organisms which can reproduce and produce viable offspring.
Lions and tigers, by this definition, are the same species, as are horses and zebras. Would you like to try again?
A link for your records: Hybrid Gallery
Logic is all we have. Without it, we would all just make incoherent babbling noises. God is not NOTHING - Nothing is nothing. Why do you call God nothing? Even the skeptic Sartre said that without an infinite reference point, the finite is meaningless.
Perhaps, than, you can tell the the essential difference, in that regard, between Berkeley's conjecture that the universe was imagined up by someone, vs. the conjecture that the universe was imagined up by God.
As we have just gone over, logic is not all that we have, it occupies a tiny, specialized niche in the universe of reasoning.
With a markedly diminished viability rate over the purebreds.
Subjective/objective is not the axis in question, no matter how obtuse you insist on being about it. The axis in question is precision/imprecision. Speciation as a classification scheme is precise, but innacurate, relative speciation of variable degree is all one can actually detect in nature.
I don't think so. Why do you say this?
Correct. Mutations are perpetuated or eliminated by selection pressure. Where did I claim otherwise?
(Keep in mind, lurkers, that he also believes that the statement "Biological evolution can be defined as a change in allele frequency" is an evolutionist fabrication, and further, that this position is supported by this web page.)
Apparently faith trumps logic, else you are left with the proposition that God, who is something, came from nothing. There is nothing in logic to distinguish between the assertion that the universe exists independently of space and time, and that God does so.
Your assertions about God are based entirely on your assertions. There are thousands of contrary assertions of faith.
That's true of humans also.
Surely, you don't take Berkeley seriously, do you? If the universe is an illusion, the Berkeley's very thoughts are illusions as well and should be ignored. Taking it one step further, I would wager that Berkeley looked both ways before he crossed the street, lest he be creamed by that illusory Mack truck.
Well--actually, if I were imbarking on an ID research project, it would be to detect apparent design without the possibility of implementation. Such as by searching for God's copyright notice in the junk DNA. This bars the usual, and effective, dismissal of ID that apparent design could have resulted from natural forces.
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