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."
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I would not put it that way. Einstein did not disagree with the science, he just thought there should be a way to reconcile quantum theory to relativity and classical physics. He tried for many years to do it but did not succeed.
Third of all, even if you had a TOE, you'd just have a unified, simple description of how all particles and forces relate to each other, you still wouldn't have any assurance that you were any closer to "ultimate Truth" than when you thought it was turtles all the way down.
Well, we would be closer anyways.
This is not the road to philosophical TRUTH. Science is an indelibly pragmatic exercise in telling useful stories.
You are back to calling science a bunch of stories, sorry that's not true. False stories do not get us to the moon, make hydrogen bombs or even telephones. If science was false we could not build one theory upon another to gain more knowledge as science has been doing for quite a long time. Sure, sometimes some theory has to be thrown out here and there, but the theories which have lasted for decades, we can be pretty sure are correct - otherwise we would not have been able to build applications and subsequent theories which have also been verified by observation and experimentation. So what science discovers we can be pretty sure conforms with reality. From this reality we can understand some truths.
BTW - being an evolutionist and a materialist, I find it really contradictory that you try to dismiss science as just fairy tales. It is science and reality which are supposedly the pillars of your beliefs.
Nope. While of course it is RNA that does the work of expressing the genes (making proteins from them), it is not RNA that initiates or deactivates gene expression. It is specific proteins that do this work:
The yeast gene GCN5 is known from genetic studies to be required for maximal activation by the yeast activator Gcn4 and several other activators with acidic activation domains. As in the case of histone deacetylases, purification, microsequencing, and cloning of the gene encoding a histone acetylase from another source (Tetrahymena, a rich source), which has a strong homology to yeast GCN5, suggested how the Gcn5 protein functions.
...
A similar activation mechanism operates in higher eukaryotes. In mammals, for instance, there is a small family of ≈400-kDa, multidomain CBP proteins. As noted earlier, one domain of CBP binds the phosphorylated CREB transcription factor (see Figure 10-46). Other domains of CRB interact with distinct classes of activation domains in other transcription factors.
From: Transcription Activation
Transcription of pre-rRNA genes by RNA polymerase I is terminated by a mechanism that requires a polymerase-specific termination factor. This DNA-binding protein binds downstream of the transcription unit,
From: Transcription Termination.
. This is not a minor quibble--repressors are vital links in a big pile of chemical negative feedback loops that keep the body operating in steady equilibrium.
Yes indeed, there is a very well balanced equiilibrium needed for an organism to survive. Everything has to be working together with everything else. The whole thing is a system which we really do not know where it starts (other than at conception - but then it really did not start then, it started with the previous life/lives) or where it ends but constantly keeps flowing back and forth during a lifetime. This is one of the problems which evolutionists cannot deal with.
I can agree with you that robotic mechanisms make better machines than humans. The question is why do you think that you are little more than a robot? Why do you put yourself (and the rest of us) down in such a manner? Is efficiency the only thing that matters?
Other than writing AI programs, of course. The only fit and sensible human activity machines can't duplicate adequately.
Seems there is something that makes us better than machines! There's also something else humans can do that machines cannot - break the rules. Other than writing AI programs, of course. The only fit and sensible human activity machines can't duplicate adequately. (They lack the taste for stale coca cola and computer games).
It seems to me that it is you that is caught up in some very illogical propositions. You are trying to deny God and the immaterial by denying that the material is real. So what are you left with? There certainly is something. That cannot be denied. So it seems that there is a big hole in your argument.
Don,
That's a very good point.
Okay, I can pretty much agree with you on the above. God is the Creator of the algorithms that science discovers - so how can you say that He is irrelevant to science? Moreover, how can you deny God through science when it is God's work that science is discovering?
An excellent point. Textbooks are often written by the luminaries in their field (or at least they give their names to it). If these folk are not beyond telling blatant lies in textbooks, you bet they will keep an article from publication because it tells the truth.
Yet evolutionists cannot say how evolution occurred. They cannot give us the scientific facts, the cause and effect of evolution. No one has seen this thing called 'natural selection' but we do know that that is not how new genetic processes arise because selection is a destroyer, not a creator, so right there you have at the center of evolutionary theory a refutation of it. So how can one say that it is more scientific to say that 'natural selection did it' when it clearly could not, than God did it, when He clearly could have?
It is indeed an oxymoron - however there are so many morons in government bureaucracies that apparently there are such things.
Oh please, there are none such theories whcih fit the scientific facts. I have asked you often to describe one (and others) and no one can come up with anything that makes any sense at all.
BTW - Amino acids do not make DNA, they do not make RNA, neither do proteins. You have the process completely backwards as did the heroes of atheism Miller and Urey.
Come on Don, you know enough biology to know that proteins do not make DNA, RNA or amino acids. They are the result, the end product of the process started by DNA.
Or do you have your "Blue Blockers" on again? hehehehehe
From the simple proposition that "all men are created equal." How, where, with what, and when are certainly interesting questions to explore both scientifically and philosophically, but morality and rights are not necessarily dependent on the answers. Humans exist. Rights may not be arbitrarily granted.
And now let me contradict myself here for a moment. I have been guilty of using "morality" and "rights" interchangably, and they most certainly are not. As others have pointed out (in the slavery subthread, for example), morality a cultural phenomenon. Rights are universal. Others are much better than I at articulating this, so allow me to refer you to this excellent thread from the Ghost of FR Past.
Obviously, you do not agree with our founding fathers.
Obviously you are poorly equipped to draw conclusions from the evidence.
Don, That's a very good point.
No, it's a very misinformed point.
You could assert that new theories merely correct a few decimal places in old theories (relativity vs Newton) but that's not at all correct if you care about TRVTH. There is an inescapable, fundamental falseness to all theories, because they all fail at the extremes. This is why some, but not alll, scientists refer to them as stories.
Trib, I'd like to return to this statement you made earlier. To me, the significant question is whether a proposition is actually true (or whether we can demonstrate that it is or is not true). A person coming to the issue of the "creation of the heavens and the earth" for the very first time would be struck by the incredible number of different accounts, for example: Creation Myths from around the World.
So the first thing one must do, it seems to me, is to try to make some sense out of this bewildering tangle of competing creation accounts. Therefore, the question is not "why wouldn't you want to believe" proposition X, but rather, why would you select proposition X as the one to believe.
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