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."
See post#1279 to B.Babbitt above. This has been posted on this thread before. You have seen it several times. The proof against abiogenesis involves far more than Pasteur's experiment - although that in itself is strong proof against abiogenesis. You dishonestly ignore the proof given to you and just keep repeating garbage. Disprove my post# 1279, then you can say it is nonsense. Until you disprove it, your claims that abiogenesis may be true are an absolute lie - just like almost everything you say.
Again, you are a hypocrite. You get so strung up on any attack made upon you yet you have the audacity to say that all evolutionists are racists.
Evolution is racist. It denies that all humans are children of God and asserts that some are more 'advanced' than others. In fact it asserts that there is a biological hierarchy of species and that humans are part of that hierarchy. So yes, racism is integral to evolutionary theory.
. Then you bring in a statment about the difference between artwork and rocks. How artwork is about invoking a feeling and impressing somebody. Now remember gore, this whole argument is about debating the improbability of something (rocks or universes) after the fact. So I make the connection that you are saying that the universe (like a piece of art) is not random and has been designed to invoke a feeling or impress somebody.
You keep repeating something which is not true, read the first sentence by me below, it says that it is absurd to say that the purpose of the Universe or the Grand Canyon is to awe us. I say it very clearly. That you continue to insist that I said what I did not say even after it has been pointed out to you gives a strong implication of dishonesty on your part:
To: B. Rabbit
There is design to art, there is no design to the Grand Canyon in the same sense. It did not arise to impress those looking at it. A painting is designed to convey a thought, a feeling, the Grand Canyon while it may awe those who look at it was not designed to provide the view but just to get water from one place to another.-me-
You're making yourself very suspect in my eyes. Backtracking to your original argument about the universe being like a work of art and melding it to the above response, you are saying that the universe is designed to convey a thought or feeling and to impress those looking at it? This is what you're saying? Absurd.
Yes it is totally absurd to say that the purpose of the Universe or the Grand Canyon is just for us to look at it and be awed. You certainly need a course in reading comprehension and no honest person that reads my statement above would think I said that. Seems that not being able to disprove my statements you try to twist them around. A very dishonest form of argument.
1238 posted on 12/28/2002 8:38 PM PST by gore3000
I just want to know if this is your statement or is this from another source? I cannot refute some of the evidence or figures displayed in this post only because my studies and pursuits lie elsewhere. Will you concede that there might be another way for evolution/abiogenesis to proceed? Is it possible that we just don't understand all of the facts yet? I'm going to play objective observer here and say yes, ID is a possibility (although it does not have the proof that you demand from evolutionists), but in the same light, even with all of YOUR facts and figures, evolution shows a possibility, no matter how small, of being legitimate. Do you think that it is possible that in 20 years, there will be a breakthrough in this field which shows how abiogenesis could have more easily and more probably happened?
Also, how do you know that evolution has never been witnessed? What would you demand as an evolution event to witness? Before 100 or so odd years ago, evolution wasn't even an idea. Prior to this, evolution could have been witnessed and dismissed. Prior to an alphabet, evolution could have been witnessed and forgotten. We are dealing with 100 years of time, which quite possibly isn't enough. Also, there are a lot of areas of the world that even in the past 100 years, people aren't around in. New species are discovered every day in some parts of South America, how old these species are nobody knows. This isn't something that makes a loud bang when it happens, so it may take some time before further evidence is discovered...
This is what Patrick Henry is talking about. You are trying to provoke me. Calling anybody who believes in the scientific theory of evolution a "racist" is laughable. I can't help but wonder how many friends you have with a thought process like that. Prove that, and I want a reputable source. I don't want a source from Creationists. I don't want a source from the KKK (or any other ignorant racist organization). I want an article in Discover Magazine or something which says that evolution demands a hierarchy of races within the human race.
Obviously older than the 6000 years which Bishop Usher deduced from the old testament but, in all likelihood, nowhere remotely close to the 4 billion year figure which atheist scientists put out.
The various systems of dating geological forms appear to be based on nothing much more than belief systems and circular reasoning and it is now known that the Mount St. Helens volcano has produced varves and other "geological evidence" which according to theory should have taken many thousands of years to produce.
One interesting comment which I've seen on an FR posting and saved, apparently from a good mathematician, is the following:
Lord Kelvin stopped Darwinism dead in its tracks when he made an irrefutable thermodynamic calculation that at the rate which the Earth is cooling off (and heat is being conducted from the interior to the surface and then radiated into space) the Earth could not possibly be more than 2 to 20 million years old. This really put "the fear of God" into the staunchest Darwinists for a while.But when radioactivity was discovered, the uniformitarians rejoiced because they had found a "new" source of heat to prolong the Earth's life-span. But they _failed_ to repeat Kelvin's calculation, because the results would have been too embarrassing. I once found in a geology text-book an account of Kelvin's calculation, which (using Fourier transform solution) I modernized by incuding on the right-hand side of the equation as a "source" of energy inside the Earth the _maximal_ modern estimates of abundance of radioactive materials inside the Earth (which I got from publications by famed Princeton physicist Dicke). Part of the reason that I was fired from BYU is that I circulated a copy of my paper showing that with inclusion of the heat sources which Lord Kelvin had not known about, the _MAXIMAL_ age of the Earth gets revised upwards from his 20 Million years to only about 200 Million years (a far cry from the billions proclaimed by uniformitarian geologists who are about to experience a sudden fall when my friends start to market cheap Radio-Shack type gadgets by means of which high-school labs & home workshop hobbyists can cause Uranium and Thorium to do in 20 minutes what the Establishment claims would take "45 billion years"!).
It sounds kind of like you can't even talk about this kind of stuff in American Academia yet. If that's the case, then Ohio and other states are not only going in the right direction, but in a NECESSARY direction. It sounds like the evolutionists have pretty much stifled debate and discussion in academia.
You can find something, a web page or a crackpot book, to back up any goofy thing you might care to advance in an argument. Most people would, before biting, ask how much good scholarship they are throwing away versus how sound is the evidence for the "revolutionary" concept, etc. But some only ask "How sexy is that revolutionary version to me?"
The age of the earth and solar system are not in major doubt. Several lines of evidence converge. Anyone peddling anything else needs to deal with why that is so.
Nice concise summary of a certain poster's game plan.
Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) was in his prime during the reign of Queen Victoria. It is a classic creationist tactic to find something in print -- no matter how old -- to "disprove" evolution, regardless of how much progress science has made since the work they are quoting. Here's a site that gives the age of the earth, as the information was gradually developed historically. Lord Kelvin's work is mentioned, as one step along the way to our present understanding. Alas for the reputation of the source of your information, Kelvin's estimate is obsolete (but it must have been a show-stopper during the McKinley administration): The Age of the Earth.
Yup. Straight out of Medved's playbook.
This is where my derogatory expression about "defrocked scientists working in their basement laboratories" derives.
There are several possible reasons why lines of evidence might converge or appear to converge.
The lines of evidence might actually converge.
Or there might be an official paradigm of some sort in place and the lines of evidence might appear to converge because in each individual case, researchers know that they will perish rather than go on publishing if they ever publish anything which does not support the paradigm.
He's on commission, paid handsomely for each post. We at Darwin CentralTM collect royalties on all DNA, and we therefore have vast resources at our disposal to bribe everyone in sight to keep the Vast Darwinian ConspiracyTM going, notwithstanding the brilliant work of the creation science crowd. But don't tell anyone. If word of this gets out, the game is over.
As I sat here in my lazy chair this morning, sipping my coffee and perusing this thread, I stopped for a moment at your post and read it a couple of times. I came to the conclusion that it may be one of the most pathetic and futile attempts to garner support I have ever seen. You should be refuting, not falling back and calling for help! Do you even realize how badly your theory has been torn up on this thread? Your best bet would be to do the opposite (which I have seen the evo camp do before as well) and TRY to get this thread pulled. If I were you, I'd move on to something else. Just my $.02. Now I am off for a quick round of golf and when I return, we'll see if you took my advice. Cheers! MM
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