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."
That may be true, however, there is no doubt that those countries treated the governed much better than previous governments and indeed much better than but a few countries do nowadays.
<sarcasm>I guess if one has no rights, one could at least hope for charity from those who have privilege.</sarcasm>
We certainly do, but the big question is why do free societies operate better than unfree societies?
Unfree societies try to mold humans into a preconceived form, but there is always something that keeps humans from fitting into it. It is called the human spirit. Something totally unlike anything else in the Universe which gives men the will, the power, the desire, to break the bonds that constrain him. This cannot be accounted for by any materialistic theory.
There is no scientific proof for any of those things having arisen by random chance. The evidence is mostly against such an interpretation. However, abiogenesis is even more ridiculous than those you mentioned. There is no known mechanism for creating something as complex as a living cell. Heck, we do not even know what life (the difference between a live cell and a dead one a minute later) is. We know of numerous natural forces, but none are able to create any so intricate, so varied, and so specific as a living thing needs to be. That is why the theories of abiogenesis out there cannot explain in any way all the scientifically known prerequisites for life and why someone is giving a million bucks just for a theory, not for experimental proof that it could have occurred by materialistic processes.
Really? Describe one such experiment.
There are many scientific experiments which solidly support the impossibility of abiogenesis. That is why no one can give a scientific explanation of how life could have arisen from matter. Here are some of the facts:
First of all is Pasteur's proof that life does not come from inert matter (and this was of course at one time the prediction of materialists). Then came the discovery of DNA and the chemical basis of organisms. This poses a totally insurmountable problem to abiogenesis. The smallest living cells has a DNA string of some one million base pairs long and some 600 genes, even cutting this number by a quarter as the smallest possible living cell would give us a string of some 250,000 base pairs of DNA. It is important to note here that DNA can be arranged in any of the four basic codes equally well, there is no chemical or other necessity to the sequence. The chances of such an arrangement arising are therefore 4^250,000. Now the number of atoms in the universe is said to be about 4^250. I would therefore call 4^250,000 an almost infinitely impossible chance (note that the supposition advanced that perhaps it was RNA that produced the first life has this same problem).
The problem though is even worse than that. Not only do you need two (2) strings of DNA perfectly matched to have life, but you also need a cell so that the DNA code can get the material to sustain that life. It is therefore a chicken and egg problem, you cannot have life without DNA (or RNA if one wants to be generous) but one also has to have the cell itself to provide the nutrients for the sustenance of the first life. Add to this problem that for the first life to have been the progenitor of all life on earth, it necessarily needs to have been pretty much the same as all life now on earth is, otherwise it could not have been the source of the life we know. Given all these considerations, yes, abiogenesis is impossible.
The financial rewards for synthesizing organic compounds far outweighs the means of any prizegiver.
No doubt that is true; however, I've been searching all over the internet and thus far, I haven't found anything to indicate the effort to synthesize organic compounds will move in the direction of proposing a mechanism for the spontaneous rise of genetic instructions in nature sufficient to give rise to life. Everything I've found has been oriented to that which exists rather than abiogenesis.
Do you have any clues to help me find information on that line of research?
Hmm, perhaps the natural world does not consult a philosophy dictionary, either to determine what life is, or to learn to adhere to the "Law of Biogenesis" before it decides what to do next.
Whoa, I was just looking for a definition of the term organism because the original sentence wasn't clear to me:
I'd say the audience is waving its prejudices like a flag.
I didn't wave a prejudice at you. I offered a solid, scientific debunking of abiogenesis by Yockey. As Nebullis noted, Yockey says life must be taken as an axiom.
There is no fundamental, discrete distinction between a scientific law and a scientific theory. Those that we call laws we simply have a higher confidence in than those we don't.
Seems you are agreeing with me Don! The reason they have a higher confidence is that they are supported by numerous experiments and related facts.
Personally, I'd be opposed to going down that road. Keeping these darn machines from wrecking havoc is hard enough as it is. As I am not routinely consulting on this subject, I expect to be dealing with some genuine AI nightmares before my watch is over.
Gee Don, you are agreeing with me! However, seems you are contradicting your statement on a previous post that computers are much less of a problem than humans!
In all my various post on these threads over the years, I've pretty much stayed away from the speciation issues because I'm mostly interested in physics, math and information theory. As it turns out, my favorite disciplines present the biggest hurdles of all to any theory of abiogenesis:
The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut
Where did I say this?
Your rejection of God as a possible cause for anything is all over this thread Don. Seems that Post# 6016 is pretty clear on the matter.
Look, just because some biologists's given you a chant to say to ward off evil thoughts, does not mean you have to turn off your brain entirely. -donh-
The science of biology says the above.-me-
That's correct--biology is self-proclaimedly about biological entities whose basic, shared mechanisms we can observe. It's not about pre-biological entities that we cannot observe.
If we cannot observe it, it is not science. More importantly though to create life you need to have organisms that function like those that exist otherwise they could not have been the precursors of the life we know. It also must be said Don that in all the experiments conducted we have never seen a living thing that behaves differently in all the essential elements of life than all the others. This is very strong evidence against your wishful thinking about the possibility of abiogenesis.
Look, just because some biologists's given you a chant to say to ward off evil thoughts, does not mean you have to turn off your brain entirely. -donh-
The science of biology says the above.-me-
That's correct--biology is self-proclaimedly about biological entities whose basic, shared mechanisms we can observe. It's not about pre-biological entities that we cannot observe.
If we cannot observe it, it is not science. More importantly though to create life you need to have organisms that function like those that exist otherwise they could not have been the precursors of the life we know. It also must be said Don that in all the experiments conducted we have never seen a living thing that behaves differently in all the essential elements of life than all the others. This is very strong evidence against your wishful thinking about the possibility of abiogenesis.
I would guess that breakthroughs will come from unexpected directions. You don't have to be searching for something to stumble on it. Was anyone specifically trying to make buckeyballs? (This is not a rhetorical question. I really don't know.)
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