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."
All scientific theories are held tentatively, and Evolutionary theory is not one of the less secure. As soon as your notion is extended to cover such less secure theories as stellar evolution, continental drift, and rotational inertia under gravity, than I'll have no problem with your prescription--until then, it is just a cheesy way to sneak support for the creationist agenda in without subjecting it to public inquiry.
I was always a C student, at best, and I majored in education because I couldn't handle anything of substance. Now I am a unionized government worker, and I am unfit for productive activity. I may attempt to teach you math, or science, or history, but be warned: I am not a mathematician, scientist, or historian, nor did I major in any of those subjects. I know nothing except what I learn from the books you are using, and the people who selected those books are probably even less qualified in those subjects than I am. Now then, let us begin ...
He did something which, to me, is even more interesting. He demonstrated that "germs" literally fallout of the air and that simply turning a culture dish upside down without covering it will prevent, or at least delay, contamination. Any cook should know that covered food lasts longer before spoiling, even at room temperature.
The missing link of evolution to modern science is the design/germ theory!
PH...didn't you have a nastrodamus prediction of the downfall of evolution---validation of God/science coming---soon?
I'd be tickled pink to have an explanation, rational or otherwise, of the perennial question: "Why is there stuff?"
However, as a question for the schools to pursue--not on my dime, thank you very much.
not the wave of a magic wish---nothing...accident?
My personal pick is "not an accident". This is, however, I point out, not a scientific data point. Science goes where its chief tool--examining objective analytical evidence about the material world--can take it. Where science is not competent to operate, it ought not to go. Examine the transcendental implications of existence in church--leave it out of the publicly controlled schools, where it can't fail to do mischief or insult to somebody's--whose children the state takes from them to educate--firmly held beliefs.
Actually, I'd extend this warranty of service to point out that many of these teachers are self-selected for education because they felt the urge to be in a "helping profession", which, over the years, I have come to interpret in the following way:
helping profession:
Those vocations in which the state, or dire circumstances, mandates to your care people who have no power to decide whether or not to accept your services, your company, your small-minded fear of anything unusual, and your accompanying simple-minded condescension. If you want to kill openhearted amiability, ambition, curiosity and pride of accomplishment, you couldn't do better than to put such people in charge of your children. There are good teachers in our public system (God only knows why), but they don't normally last very long.
Hey, I'm not complaining. He actually spoke to me in comprehensible english. It's always interesting to bet on how long that might continue, when it occurs.
I guess you could consider this good enough for government work. Let me urge you to abandon the word formal (which gets a little slippery when pinned down), and instead take up the notion that inductive vs. deductive reasoning constitutes the important distinction, and to bear in mind that most math is applied, and a bit hard to distinguish easily from applied science, much of which is important in modern engineering, yet has no deductive underpinnings--no formal sysematically developed theorems derived from basic assumptions (formally: postulates) backing them up.
As per Popper, since we believe scientific principles because of inductive reasoning, it only takes one unmistakable example of an entity violating an inductively verified principle to refute a principle. This is something of a different animal from a deductive proof or disproof derived, as it were, from first principles of understanding.
There is, I would aver, a substantial structural difference between these two modes of thought, not just a matter of scale or degee of formality.
There is no evidence whatsover for a naturalistic, non-supernatural creation of the universe.
If only they were so kind as to present themselves in the public arena as tentative.
No, I did not know that. Would happily accept this as true if you could please cite a reliable source. Thanks.
Whether he proved it or not, it is considered axiomatic.
By creationists, perhaps, not by any large number of biological scientists. Axiomatic means assumed, rather than proved, if your claim is based on Pasteur's work, this is a self-contradictory claim.
Your high school history textbook. The biological theory of the Soviet Union was Lysenkoism.
Yes
rather than proved,
Yes
This -- "whether he proved it or not, it is considered axiomatic"-- is a self-contradictory claim.
Where is the contradiction?
How could he have proven that life absolutely cannot arise from non-living matter?Actually, this is a case where the odds really would be 1040,000 against spontaneous generation. You can't get a complete, modern bacteria to form spontaneously from free amino acids & nucleic acids. The odds really would be astronomical.Whether he proved it or not, it is considered axiomatic.
That's why the first self-replicating, auto catalyzing entity would have to have been much, much smaller & simpler than that. And lo & behold, the necessary molecules exist! And they're pretty small, too: 32 amino acids for the smallest self-replicating, chiroselective (filters out the wrong-handed amino acids) peptide. And there are known auto-catalytic RNAs that are, IIRC, less than 100 bases long. Meanwhile there are minerals that have been shown to catalyze the growth of both peptides and RNA strands to just such lengths.
With these kinds of molecules forming the first simple self-replicating entities, and having a couple hundred million years to carry out the experiments in all kinds of microclimates spanning the whole Earth, the barriers to abiogenesis become much smaller.
Always trying to put the shoe on the other foot. You messed up on this one though. We do know EXACTLY the chemical components of life, we do know EXACTLY the code by which life is ordered. It is from this knowledge that the SCIENTIFIC determination that abiogenesis is impossible has been made.
Gore3000-manure. This is just a long-winded way of avoiding making your claim explicitly, so that it can be easily seen, which is that DNA whopped into existence from simple organic molecules with no intermediate steps. There is nothing compelling about this claim. you don't know how DNA came to be; so you don't know squat about how hard it was to do.
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