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."

You continue to attack the man instead of refuting the facts.

YOu continue to substitute fantasy for facts anyone could verify in a library in a few minutes. Ken Miller is pre-eminent in biology. We don't let steet people write our principle college biology textbooks.

The fact is that the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum has yet to be disproven.

And, as usual, you can't even get the question right, much less the answer. It is irreducible complexity that needs to be proven. There is no proof, just Behein speculation, that natural causes of a form we have not yet fathomed produced flagellum.

Your buddy Miller has tried, including with his recent plagiarism about the secretory system which was discussed on these threads over a year ago. It's an old story which he is telling and not giving credit to the original author.

Look, bluehead, he cites a paper that demonstrates a possible naturalistic pathway to flagellum. That does NOT satisfy the definition of plagerism; there is no "refutation" to which you allude possible, since only possibility was offered by the paper in question; and even if it were possible to provide such a disproof, it STILL would not make your case, since to proof irreducible complexity, you'd have to close off every possible door of intermediate development leading to flagellum, and that ain't been done, cause it would be an infinite task.

Even for you, this is remarkably obtuse.

Of course that theory of the secretory system itself was discredited as a refutation of Behe's assertion that the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex almost as soon as it was published.

Yea right. Kindly supply the cite so that I can read it.

However, evolutionists having nothing possible to refute irreducible complexity, keep recycling the same nonsense over and over long after it has been shown to be false. Ken Miller is very good at that and while he may have a scientific PHD, he has never accomplished anything valuable in the realm of science himself. He is just a popularizer of evolution, not a real scientist. If he were a real scientist he would not have published such retreaded nonsense from a internet blog of all places!

Keep it up, maybe you'll open your mouth so wide, you can get both feet in up to your neck and disappear. Why don't you spend a minute looking at Ken Miller's biography before you take such delusional fliers?

Surely you're not so intellectually primitive as to argue from consequences . . .

Why not? That's exactly what adherents to the theory of evolution do. They have nothing to do but adduce and deduce from the consequences of their experience, and thus show themselves to be the primates of the human race.

...or to attempt guilt by association?

Guilt by association my ass. These people practice what they preach, and they expect the rest of us to fall in lock step behind their silly notions.

. . . In the meantime, the supernatural is outside the realm of science,. . . .

Looks like a fundamental ASSumption to me, but then, I'm not sure which particular theory of evolution you espouse. Are you absolutely sure these two are mutually exclusive? Would you please provide proof? A simple summary will do.

You can, of course, cite examples of this dishonesty . . .

How about the simple fact that you've dodging the association between naturalist thought and evolution throughout our exchanges? Either you can't see the forest for the trees, or you're just trying to piss me off. Your request for "simple summary" was only a pretense.

". . . your sole contribution to the discussion is 'The Theory of Evolution addresses the origin and purpose of life, but I won't say how and I can't say where.'"

Perish the thought that evolution could ever sufficiently "address" the origin and purpose of life. It only makes assumptions about these things, and it's only a theory.

"Not one [Theory of Evolution] that I am familiar with attempted to assign a purpose to life."

I would not expect such an attempt, but rather a studied avoidence of any mention of purpose. After all, if it's all ASSUMED to have happened by chance, there cannot possibly be any reason to address purpose.

"I can state the Theory of Evolution in a single sentence."

And in so doing you can show yourself to have joined the minions who make up the primates of the human race. No better than simple fools.

"Your high school history textbook."

You mean the Revised Edition?

Meanwhile I would ask if the following statement is true or not:

"At a very early age, while still a pupil in the ecclesiastical school, Comrade Stalin developed a critical mind and revolutionary sentiments. He began to read Darwin and became an atheist."

If true, I would have to say a certain theory of evolution had a deleterious effect on the human race. I might even go so far as to suggest this theory of evolution became a guiding priciple in Stalin's life. But hey, it's just an innocuous theory, right?

Well, that 'pragmatic local gravity' (never heard it called that!) is a pretty essential part of the theory of gravity itself.

Really? Than expand on it to explain the theory of gravity's conspicuous failure to describe the outer orbits of stars around galaxies.

Take that part away and it is just nonsense. So my point is that there are certain universal laws which cannot be denied and are indeed provable. Gravity is a fact of life, has never been disproven, and is easilly ascertainable. The 'fact' of evolution though is nowhere to be found.

What proof can you offer that the law of gravity is operating in the vacuum of intergalactic outer space? Explain how your proof differs from the proof that morphological continuity between species in different layers of dirt implies a continuum of evolution through the creatures we don't find in the dirt? How is this different from the continuum of gravity in intergalactic vacuum?

For that matter, where is your deductive proof that local gravity is good for all time? Why are there pictures of astronauts floating around in freefall? Why do billions of pounds of insect and plant detritus float off into space at the top of our air curculation system? I thought you said you had proof of local gravity. Your proof is just like the proof that the earth is flat. Millions of people went out and looked, and, indeed, the earth SEEMED flat. Just like millions of people jumped off cliffs, or fell off chairs, and fell down, and invented the theory of gravity to explain it. Observed repeated events are only proof until the day they fail, either because of changing conditions, or more exacting tasks or instruments of observation.

All you have is high confidence in gravity, due to repeated observation and the highly fallable principle of induction. If you had proof, you would have published it the first time I asked to see it, years ago.

The fundamental assumption is precisely the formation of a discrete life form from piles of raw material. Your challenge is to produce one that has plausible raw materials and an environment which will lead to a living organism.

No, it isn't. If you want to claim irreducible complexity in in any sense proved, you must shut down all other possibilities. that's not a doable task by finite entities. As stated here, irreducible complexity's a transcendental claim of zero scientific merit. It cannot be verified because the potential experimental base is infinite.

Going on and on about "100 polymers" doesn't change this. Every aspect of life is equally highly improbable, if you persist in donning a filter that only lets you accept instantaneous, miraculous solutions. This is a baseless argument that pretends to rigor, because it pretends to know that life could only have occured via an artificially constrained, and entirely rigged, unlikely state-space and selection criteria, from which it pretends to be calculating long statistical odds.

Thank you both for your replies! I do very much appreciate all the details and qualifications. I've learned a lot!

And I feel better about having a ready answer when the subject comes up in casual conversation. Around here, these kinds of questions come up all the time because we often sit around the table after dinner - sometimes even until dawn - exploring subjects like this.

However, experience shows that when they ask "How does the TV work?" - give 'em the short answer first (LOL!) Thanks to this debate, I have a ready short answer for this issue and lots of keys for exploring.

If only they were so kind as to present themselves in the public arena as tentative.

If you want to know about science, a good bet is to ask scientists. If you do, you will here the disclaimer all the time, since scientists would mostly like to get back to work, rather than become public spokesmen for Truth, when all they really have is high confidence.

Since scientists don't get to control what goes into elementary textbooks, neither they, nor science should be charged with the offense.

the barriers to abiogenesis become much smaller.

Yep, they become 10^39,999

Read the experiment on the 32 residue peptide. It was a designed peptide. Apparently it was split into 2 - 16 residue halves of single chirality(both types) for a total of 4 chunks.

The researchers used four different peptide fragments, each containing only D- or L-amino acids. Four different products were in principle possible: two homochiral, comprised of only D- or L-amino acids, and two heterochiral, made from two differently handed fragments.

But on mixing the fragments, the researchers obtained predominantly homochiral products. Once formed, the homochiral molecules acted as templates, accelerating their own replication, the team says. The heterochiral molecules, in contrast, did not use this ploy to compete.

Here are the odds.

The specific 16 residue peptide(20aa universe) with heterochirality --- 20¹⁶ = 6.5536E+20

The specific 16 residue peptide with homochirality --- 39¹⁶ = 2.8644E+25 (glycine is not chiral)

The specific 32 residue peptide with homochirality --- 39³² = 8.20479E+50 (glycine is not chiral) and both parts are necessary for the creation of the whole.

Now the "self-replication" consists of joining two 16 residue halves together. This produces the designed peptide which then "catalyzes" the formation of further molecules of the 32 residue peptide. Well, as you can see the likelyhood of the two 16 residue pieces coming into existence is about 1 in 3E20. So to see how this experiment would work you must mix the homochiral parts to heterochiral parts in the ratio of 1 homo to 3e20 heteros. This is not a very good ratio for the procreation of the homos. This must also be viewed in relation to the pieces and parts of peptides of length 1 to "as long as a peptide can get in the just-so environment created by the Darwininian". (these other peptides will be competing for the goodies in the prebiotic soup).

regarding your discussion with AndrewC on irreducible complexity, I'd like to submit that randomness is a more likely target for falsification

Oh, I entirely agree. I think it's been clear the mutations, particularly in the more complex beasties, are far from random. However, I don't think that makes a particularly outstanding case for ID. Our immune system transmutes our DNA in an extremely non-random manner to attack pathogens. Why couldn't mutation have fallen under the aegis of the same genii? In providing gender selection that malleable under intelligent direction, aren't we accomplishing that very thing? Why would we assume we're the first entities to "think" of such a thing?

Taking a somewhat different tack, I'd like to submit that the important distinction here ought not to be between random and non-random, but between random selection from a poplation with a central tendency, vs random selection from a population without a central tendency.

The traction of creationist argements in this arena often comes from failing to differentiate between these. If we assume, (which, as I've said, I don't) mutation occurs at random (meaning without a central tendency--evenly distributed throughout the selection space (uniform continuous distribution, the stat jocks like to say) we still go through the process of selection before reproduction. This process produces from a random set with uniform continuous distribution, a random set with a central distribution; the more rigorous the selection, the more pronounced the central tendency.

Whatever it is you're arguing about, it's not the theory of evolution. That's why I asked. You're pretending that scientists who use fossil and genetic evidence to formulate a scientific theory in a fair attempt to explain the diversity of life have set in motion a chain of events deliberately designed to cause the downfall of the Western World.

I got news for ya, Bub, ALL science specifically ignores the existence of God. You won't find God mentioned on the Periodic Table of Elements, Superstring Theory does not have God pedalling a spinning wheel, et cetera, so forth, and so on. Science concerns that which is measurable. In the absence of any evidence, "God" is an arbitrary term.

Science tries to figure out "How it works." Religion tries to tell people "What it means." And as long as both keep their fingers out of the other's pie they can co-exist peacefully. You want one to do the functions of both.

My request for a simple summary was just that. I don't understand what it is you think you're attacking. Confidentially, I don't think you understand it either. You have demonstrated abysmal comprehension with respect to the limitations of science, the definition of a theory, the principles of cause and effect, and general conversational decorum. I hypothesize you know damn-well that your version of the theory of evolution is a poorly-constructed strawman, and you're just pissed off that I called you on it.

And neither is there any evidence for a supernaturalistic origin of the universe

Well, there is actually quite a bit, although not necessarily of the empiracle scientific type. Billions testify to the existence of God. Reports of the supernatural exists in every culture from every period.

Then you have the testimony in the Bible. You have prophecies coming true. Think of the return of the Jews to Israel.

And then there is the inductive reasoning involving the laws of conservation of energy and biogenesis -- which I noted earlier. While some dispute this as an indication of a supernatural creator, these paradoxical things exists.

There is no evidence for a naturalistic origin. It takes greater faith -- far, far greater faith -- to disbelieve in God than to believe.

And what has this to do with biological evolution?

Nothing, really but you chimed in on the issue of biogenesis, remember.

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