Evolution Disclaimer Supported

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 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.

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."

Self-recreating proteins have been on the table as a possible explanation for nearly as long as self-creating RNA has. How biology works now isn't somehow set in stone, much as Behe's and Dempski's arguments depend on this unlikely supposition.

This is the problem with discussing scientific questions with evolutionists - they claim that things which science has never seen may be true because their theory needs it for it to be true. Sorry, as you admit, no such RNA or proteins have ever been found so whatever you are saying is not science, it is just a vague hope that what is known to be scientifically true nowadays will be completely reversed in the future. The process DNA, RNA, amino acids, protein is the central dogma of modern biology and to say that the process - which is verified daily an uncounted number of times - will be shown to be backwards is totally ludicrous.

By your statement also you are admitting that there is no possible explanation for abiogenesis which conforms to the scientifically known facts. Fairy tales are nice for children, but they are not reality.

Vade -- saw this here, thought of you...

;)

Skeptic Pitied

FAYETTEVILLE, AR—Craig Schaffner, 46, a Fayetteville-area computer consultant, has earned the pity of friends and acquaintances for his tragic reluctance to embrace the unverifiable, sources reported Monday.


	Above: The tragically skeptical Schaffner.

"I honestly feel sorry for the guy," said neighbor Michael Eddy, 54, a born-again Christian. "To live in this world not believing in a higher power, doubting that Christ died for our sins—that's such a sad, cynical way to live. I don't know how he gets through his day."

Coworker Donald Cobb, who spends roughly 20 percent of his annual income on telephone psychics and tarot-card readings, similarly extended his compassion for Schaffner.

"Craig is a really great guy," Cobb said. "It's just too bad he's chosen to cut himself off from the world of the paranormal, restricting himself to the limited universe of what can be seen and heard and verified through empirical evidence."

Also feeling pity for Schaffner is his former girlfriend Aimee Brand, a holistic and homeopathic healer who earns a living selling tonics and medicines diluted to one molecule per gallon in the belief that the water "remembers" the curative properties of the medication.

"Don't get me wrong—logic and reason have their place," Brand said. "But Craig fails to recognize the danger of going too far with medical common sense to the exclusion of alternative New Age remedies like chakra cleansing and energy-field realignment."

Eddy said he has tried repeatedly to pull Schaffner back from the precipice of lucidity.

"I admit, science might be great for curing diseases, exploring space, cataloguing the natural phenomena of our world, saving endangered species, extending the human lifespan, and enriching the quality of that life," Eddy said. "But at the end of the day, science has nothing to tell us about the human soul, and that's a critical thing Craig is missing. I would hate for his soul to be lost forever because of a stubborn doubt over the actual existence and nature of that soul."

Gina Hitchens, a lifelong astrology devotee, blamed Schaffner's lack of faith on an accident of birth.

"Craig can't entirely help himself, being a Gemini," Hitchens said. "Geminis are always very skeptical and destined to feel pain throughout life as a result of their closed-mindedness. If you try to introduce Craig to anything even remotely made-up, he starts going off about 'evidence this' and 'proof that.' If only the poor man were open-minded enough to stop attacking everything with his brain and just once look into his heart, he'd find all the proof he needed. But, sadly, he's unable to let even a little bit of imagination drive his core beliefs."

Perhaps the person who pities Schaffner most is his brother Frank, a practicing Scientologist since 1991.

"It's bad enough when someone has the ignorance to reject Dianetics in spite of its tremendous popularity," Frank said. "But Craig isn't even willing to try a free introductory course. Scientology has the potential to free humanity from the crippling yoke of common sense, unshackling billions from the chains of century after century of scientific precedent, and yet he still won't give it a try."

"I realize that Craig seems very happy with his narrow little common-sense-based worldview," Frank continued, "but when you think of all the widely embraced beliefs that are excluded by that way of thinking, you have to feel kind of sad."

Yup, we sure know that natural selection only destroys, we sure know it does not create anything. This is pretty obvious to anyone except evolutionists who turn everything backwards. If my statement were false, instead of insulting you would be refuting it, but my statement is true so all you can do is insult.

Natural selection destroys that which cannot survive, but does NOT destroy that which can survive under those particular circumstances or climate.

We actually agree, because without natural selection destroying, then we would have no changes whatsoever, either positive or negative.

How natural selection being a destroyer somehow invalidates evolution is beyond me, because it is a major piece of the puzzle, without Natural selection DESTROYING the weakest genetic creatures, then the whole process stops.

Again, this does nothing to hurt Evolution, it actually backs it?

What exactly was your point again? Oh, yeah, that's right, a major part of evolutionary theory that actually makes it work, somehow disproves it. Where did this leap come from? Your logic is majorly flawed.

Let's get it from an expert, shall we? Stephen Jay Gould.

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_selection.html

Natural selection as a positive force

Snip

For example, Charles Lyell—whom Darwin convinced about the factuality of evolution but who never (much to Darwin's sadness and frustration) accepted the mechanism of natural selection—admitted that he had become stymied on the issue of creativity. He could understand, he wrote in his fifth journal on the "species question" in March, 1860, how natural selection might act like two members of the "Hindoo Triad"—like Vishnu the preserver and Siva the destroyer, but he simply could not grasp how such a force could also work like Brahma, the creator (in Wilson, 1970, p. 369).

E. D. Cope, chief American critic and exponent of neo-Lamarckism, chose a sardonic title to highlight Darwin's supposedly fatal weakness in claiming a creative role for natural selection. He called his book The Origin of the Fittest (1887)—a parody on Darwin's "survival of the fittest," and a motto for what natural selection could not accomplish. Cope wrote: "The doctrines of 'selection' and 'survival' plainly do not reach the kernel of evolution, which is, as I have long since pointed out, the question of 'the origin of the fittest.' This omission of this problem from the discussion of evolution is to leave Hamlet out of the play to which he has given the name. The law by which structures originate is one thing; those by which they are restricted, directed, or destroyed, is another thing" (1887, p. 226).

We can understand the trouble that Darwin's contemporaries experienced in comprehending how selection could work as a creative force when we confront the central paradox of Darwin's crucial argument: natural selection makes nothing; it can only choose among variants originating by other means. How then can selection possibly be conceived as a "progressive," or "creative," or "positive" force?

In resolving this paradox, Darwin recognized his logical need, within the basic structure of his argument, to explicate the three main requirements and implications of an argument for selection's creativity: (1) the nature of variation; (2) the rate and continuity of change; (3) the meaning of adaptation. This interrelated set of assertions promotes natural selection from mere existence as a genuine, but secondary and negative, mechanism to domination as the primary cause of evolutionary change and pattern. This set of defenses for selection's creativity therefore ranks as the second of three essential postulates, or "minimal commitments" of Darwinian logic.

As the epitome of his own solution, Darwin admitted that his favored mechanism "made" nothing, but held that natural selection must be deemed "creative" (in any acceptable vernacular sense of the term) if its focal action of differential preservation and death could be construed as the primary cause for imparting direction to the process of evolutionary change. Darwin reasoned that natural selection can only play such a role if evolution obeys two crucial conditions: (1) if nothing about the provision of raw materials—that is, the sources of variation—imparts direction to evolutionary change; and (2) if change occurs by a long and insensible series of intermediary steps, each superintended by natural selection—so that "creativity" or "direction" can arise by the summation of increments.

Under these provisos, variation becomes raw material only—an isotropic sphere of potential about the modal form of a species. Natural selection, by superintending the differential preservation of a biassed region from this sphere in each generation, and by summing up (over countless repetitions) the tiny changes thus produced in each episode, can manufacture substantial, directional change. What else but natural selection could be called "creative," or direction-giving, in such a process? As long as variation only supplies raw material; as long as change accretes in an insensibly gradual manner; and as long as the reproductive advantages of certain individuals provide the statistical source of change; then natural selection must be construed as the directional cause of evolutionary modification.

And again? Your point was what?

Natural selection destroys that which cannot survive, but does NOT destroy that which can survive under those particular circumstances or climate.

Note above your statement about 'particular circumstances or climates'. Thus natural selection will destroy that which might be helpful for a species in different circumstances or climates. Remember this, it is important.

We actually agree, because without natural selection destroying, then we would have no changes whatsoever, either positive or negative.

Not correct, without natural selection destroying we could still have changes - if there were a mechanism for making changes. So where do the changes come from?:

As long as variation only supplies raw material; as long as change accretes in an insensibly gradual manner; and as long as the reproductive advantages of certain individuals provide the statistical source of change; then natural selection must be construed as the directional cause of evolutionary modification. (from Gould article you posted)

Note that even though Gould is writing in modern times when much more biology is known than when Darwin was writing, he still calls 'variation' the source of evolution without saying where this 'variation' comes from. He is thus giving another abstract term as the basis for the workability of the abstract term 'natural selection' creating something.

There are a couple of problems with this and one is that since evolution claims that man ultimately arose from bacteria, which are much simpler than humans, it is pretty obvious that a process which destroys variety could not have been the source of the changes needed to turn a bacteria into a human.

So again, your long post has not answered the question or refuted my statement since the source of 'variation' has not been given. Let me note this, which science has definitely shown with the problem of nearly extinct species - the variations in the genetic pool of a species are very important. Destroying them results in the species being less viable. Remember what I mentioned about climate. Well climate changes and when it changes back the species will not have the ability of regaining the variations lost due to the destruction wrought by natural selection. In other words, natural selection destroys the adaptability of a species, it does not increase it. So as you can see, this insistence by evolutionists on natural selection as the source of evolution is wrong on many counts and also begs the question as to the source of evolution. Therefore we know for sure, as I have been insisting, that natural selection is not the source of evolution.

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