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."

Steganalysis?

I suspect that's not the sort of model you want to use for determining if something exhibits design or not. One possibility: there ARE fractal-math based tests for artificiality which are used to detect man-made things out in deserts and what not and algorithms which are used to detect tanks and other targets out in the sands. Something like that might provide a basis for determining of living things are "designed" or just sort of happened.

Peer review is not ideological

Here, it may help you to look at it from another point of view: Try a "peer review" of a paper that denies the deity of Jesus Christ where your reviewers are all Southern Baptists.

(PS they would be right to pan the paper, but the point is that truth is not determined by peer review -- Jehovah's Witnesses would yet give a different reading -- but by something beyond it.)

Letter from Charles Darwin to Karl Marx October, 1873

You have been the victim of false information, and now some kind of twisted devotion to your cause is preventing you from facing up to it. I'm going to drop this topic, but I'll try -- one more time -- to tell you why everything you believe about this fantasy "association" is false. If you push this issue again, I'll have to assign you to the "Hopeless Brick Wall" category.

1. Evolution and communism are incompatible (struggle for survival vs to each according to his needs)
2. Marx was a published commie activist years before Darwin published Origin
3. That's important. Communism was a full-blown movement when Darwin was an unknown.
4. After Darwin was famous, Marx tried to dedicate his final work, Das Capital, to him, and was rejected.
5. Marx's final work was decades in the making, e.g. Marx wrote about "labor theory of value" years before before Darwin published Origin.
6. Marx's work doesn't pretend to depend upon Darwin's (because it was formulated before Darwin published).
7. Remember point 1 above. Commie economics has nothing to do with natural selection.
8. If Marx had tried to dedicate the work to Queen Victoria, what would that prove?

"You are pre-supposing that there are only two points of view."

Yes, I am. Namely, given the fact that the universe exists we are faced with only two possibilities as to its ultimate origin and purpose. Accident or Intelligence. What might you propose as a third point of view?

"Again, you seem to base your thought on a preconceived view of a type of 'god'. The founders arguably did not."

I suppose, if you want to revise their writing so as to omit all references to God, Divne Providence, Creator, etc., you'd have a leg to stand on here. Their references are generic as far as I can tell, and they are many.

Isn't "evolution by mutation" a fabrication to hide the fact that no living creature has yet to be observed "evolving?" I'm not sure whether to count it as sad or comical to see so many things fabricated to fit a theory.

Indeed it is. The complexity and interrelatedness of organisms speaks against transformation by mutations.

"Neither do I, but science class is not a public arena."

Last time I checked sciences classes were required in public schools.

"How does it educate children to refuse to honestly answer honest questions?"

Real teachers, just like real scientists, know how to keep their mouth shut when they are ignorant. I hope, with your attitude and aptitude, you claim neither profession at this time.

I know what's comical. The fact that you think it's a simple thing to "observe" evolution.

So how can evolution be science if it cannot be observed? Now if evolution were true, it seems to me we should see at least some sign of the gradual transformations it claims have been happening all the time since life first appeared on earth amongst some of the millions of living species.

"You exclude the counterargument. Not playing fair. Things that give the appearance of design exist, snowflakes and diamonds for example, the assumption that a designer therefore must exist, however, omits some important common steps in critical analysis of evidence you'd never get away with in a decently run courtroom."

Actually, in your haste to assume my conclusion, you've taken my argument a step futher than I've heretofore proposed. All I'm asking is whether the universe contains "designed things" or not. You've chosen to extrapolate "appearance of design" from this and brought up snowflakes. I would be happy to include snowflakes among "unintelligent" or "undesgined" matter.

Let's stick with the object known as a pencil. Does it have the attributes we call "design" or not? That's all I care to ask for now. If you wish to tell me it only has "the appearance of design," I guess I'll have to put you in the radical skeptic category. You know. Those people who think all of existence ais a figment of their imagination.

Oh yes. And what "counter argument" am I excluding? Please put it in simple terms. Add it to my list of possibilities so I can review and either concur or reject.

Thanks.

"Of course things have been observed evolving, as most creationists have by now acceded to."

Sure, if by "evolve" one means simple or complex changes within a species. Funny thing is, evolutionists have yet to give sufficient evidences that even these small changes occured randomly, with no trace of intelligence behind the cause and results. They've merely looked at it, recorded it, placed it into their pastebook of pre-conceived notions, and palmed it off on the rest of the world as "science."

Is this somehow supposed to merit unquestioned dogma in the classroom?

Sigh. Apparent design does not demonstrate the existence of a designer. That is only one of any number of equally likely hypotheses that can arise in a fact-vacuum. It only demonstrates the intractable nature of your commitment to fallacies of the the excluded middle.

Of course it does. You are not going to make the ridiculoust statement that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is the result (or could be the result) of a bunch of paint cans falling up don't you?

That is only one of any number of equally likely hypotheses that can arise in a fact-vacuum. It only demonstrates the intractable nature of your commitment to fallacies of the the excluded middle.

Totally false. All hypothesis are not equally likely. The hypothesis that there are infinite universes for example is totally unscientific because it claims something to have happened about which we know absolutely nothing about. The claim that abiogenesis is possible is also totally unscientific and atheists cannot even formulate a hypothesis that fits the presently known scientific facts about life. So intelligent design has a very solid scientific base behind it.

"I am suggesting that teaching children . . . is adults making and enforcing unilateral decisions upon somewhat resistant unformed minds."

I must agree that in the case of children a certain amount of enforcement is needed, as well as a sound cirriculum, etc. But that is not all education and science is about. The human mind must ultimately be free to question existence as we know it. What evolutionists have bagged for the past century in public education is a stranglehold on free inquiry. If anything, they are the true fans of what you call "Proof by Repetition."

"ID is not science--it fails nearly every qualification exam anyone has ever thought of."

As I mentioned earlier, good science does not have to make hay out of ID. It would look pretty stupid for a scientist to take ID and bash it over the heads of the public. The public by and large accepts ID without even being taught about it.

Better science does not discount ID as a possibility altogether, and I don't think you've done that.

". . .was nearly dedicated to Darwin's Origin of Species."

"Is that like being nearly pregnant?"

Yes, if we allow an analogy. Although Marx would like to have gone to bed with Darwin, Darwin spurned his advances. So, Marx had to let his seed spill out into pages that have a keen affinity for Darwinian "knowledge."

"Creationism is not and cannot be a theory in the scientific sense in that it cannot be used to make predictions."

Would it be unreasonable to assume that IF intelligent design is involved with the universe, THEN [prediction:] theories would arise to explain the laws of nature?

"Stalin wiped darwinian evolution out of Russia using the firing squad argument."

Yep. He practiced what he believed, and what he believed was ultimately inspired by Darwin. Lysenkoism was his fig leaf, and by extension now it is yours.

...a field which is null is not simply omitted. The field always exists, and thus the possibility of a value - but in the null instance, a value for the field (including zero) it does not exist.

Would you say, A-G, that a field which is null is simply an empty set? An empty set may acquire members in time, though any time it actually does lack members (including the member zero, as you point out), it is "null." I agree we can't just throw away the idea of null, for then we would have no way to capture the idea of potentiality.

Do you believe there is no connection between Marxism and Darwinism whatsoever?

I answered this exact same question back in post 1997.

I first addressed your "Darwin-Marx" issue in post 1973, then added more in 2013, in 2020, in 2022, in 2031, and attempted a summary in 2145.

I have been patient and polite. I have responded with diligence and I have given citations for all the assertions I have made. I have now experienced sufficient dialog with you to understand that you are utterly impervious to facts and logic. You are now on "virtual ignore" -- a status you richly deserve. Good luck, good bye, and God bless you.

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