No, his lips are sealed:
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."
Even if your hypothetical were true, it does not help your materialist cause.
I don't have a materialist cause, as I am not a philosophical materialist, I am a rigorous philosophical naturalist, which means I'm neutral about immaterial causes. Which means, incidently, that I don't have a hypothetical, either, since I'm indifferent. Oh, and I don't have a cause either, except to see that science is taught in the science classroom. Other than that, though, your response is right on the mark.
The imaginer is still an intelligent being and your reality (and mine) still depends on the rules set by that intelligent being.
You don't know that. And we've been through this before. You have no proof that the imagineer is intelligent, if intelligent, you have no indication that suggests to what level of detail the imagineer had to understand the details of what he was imagining for it to work out. You have no proof that the imagineer isn't caught in an endless loop where she imagines up something that in turn imagines her up. When you propose immaterial causes, you can't be disproved, but for the same reasons, you can't pin them down with any persuasive authority.
No. Pragmatism is simply the best we can do. I'm not enamored of pragmatism or democracy, I just think they have the best track record, and have the most universally supportable philosophies: catholics have never been keen on Protestant governments, and vice versa, and neither are particularly keen on Islamic governments. And, by the way, whether we are a constitutional federation or not, we clearly are a representational democracy. The Constitution devotes most of it's energy the technical details of our democracy.
Loose lips indicate a degenerate mutation.
In what manner does observing stellar incidences, and infering stellar histories, differ from observing fossils and morphologically similar modern forms and infering biological evolution? In both cases, you are pinning a theory that implies an enormous range of behaviors you have not observed on a tiny handful you have observed.
No, his lips are sealed:
[Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!]
You mean like prokariotes so closely resemble social ants?
Really? This is the problem of reductionism, you take a single feature that may be similar in two different species while ignoring the millions of features in which they differ. This is a totally bogus argument.
This is a totally irrelevant defense. You said whatever creates life must function like life. Do prokariotes' functions "essentially" resemble social ants functions, or not? Do prokariotes cede their genetic potential to a central queen? Do prokariotes swarm seasonally?
We were not, we were talking about the epistimology of science. If you want to talk about biology, you're entitled, however, you are not entitled thereby to suppose that you have demonstrated that the question raised is irrelevant.
We certainly have examined enough species from enough totally different systems to know that the essentials of biology work the same in all of them.
Perhaps you forgot to answer the original question. In what manner do prokariotes swarm, or have queens? In what manner do programmers essentially resemble programs? Where is it writ that you have to be "essentially" like something to produce it?
So you do not have a single scientific peg to hang your abiogenist hat on Don, all you have is the pap from pseudo-scientists who inhabit the underworld of Art Bell and others who cater to the absurd.
Oh, as opposed to the notion that prokariotes JUST HAD to pop up instantly, aided or unaided, from a pile of amino acid junk. What self-serving pap.
the scientific community concurs that instantaneous biogenesis from amino acid junk is, while not quite impossible, scientifically fruitless to consider. The scientific community has not, therefore--your erroneous representations to the contrary notwithstanding--therefore concluded that abiogensis is impossible.
I have now taken the trouble to examine a couple of Yockey's offerings, and I think this is a reasonably fair reprise in his own words on this subject:
Even the simplest forms of life, with their store of DNA, are characterized by specified complexity. Therefore life itself is prima facie evidence that some form of intelligence was in existence at the time of its origin.
Or, I'll try to paraphrase, DNA is like language, and nothing as complicated as language occurs in non-biological nature.
Your contention that this is not the same store Behe and Dembski shop at is, not, in my mind borne out.
There are events you can interpret as primative signals in non-biological nature, anywhere you find an energy conserving cycle maintained by negative feedback. (Or, in fact, where any dynamic equilibrium is maintained) A bubble in a pile of bubbles comes to mind. When a given bubble thins out, it "signals" the surrounding bubbles at their interface to send in more long-chain hydrophobic/philic re-enforcements.
It is not presently my opinion that the argument from "specified complexity" differs in a significant way from Behe and Dempski's arguments from astonishment.
Life could have arisen from enduring collections of sulpher bubbles, or charged clay lattices, or anything else that's sufficiently adhesive, and can sustain dynamic equalibrium without the aid of DNA until quite late in the story, and without DNA to kick around, Yockey's story falls apart for me. His attempt to defend against this problem--by claiming that whatever preceeds DNA must be of DNA's "specified complexity" is, well, undemonstrated.
If prokariotes can give rise to social ants, it is not necessary to show that prokariotes somehow swarmed and ceded genetic priveledges to a queen. A thing can be more informationally complex than it's product; a database can be more complex than the language you programmed it in, or the computer it runs on.
You have more intellectual commitment to abiogenesis than the people offering the prize:
Thanks for the discussion!
You do not address my central point. I am not completely sure it exists, but I am completely sure that, at our current state of knowledge, it is at least as plausable as the whopped-up-from-organic-tar theories Behe and Dembski attempt to claim the universe is confined to. Please note that they have no claim on the prize, either.
I am not interested in what is axiomatic, just what is true.
You can say "rights come from God" until you are blue in the face, and you can write it into a constitution, but none of this makes rights come from God. You can't make it true by just saying it, even with an authoritarial air while in the process of founding a government. Apparently in this particular corner of the universe, you DO think something can be made true by simply imagining it.
It's not writ somewhere in stone that this had to be the case for all time, and if it wasn't, DNA would have been disfunctional. If you, a pseudo-living entity (lets say, for the purposes of argument, a collection of self-reenforcing chemical cycles wondering about in a sea of sulfer bubbles), are not faced with energy or molecular hoarding problems, than the way you compete for survival is by just simply enduring--keeping whatever collection of negative-feedback corrected cycles you have, that make the bubbbles last, continue operating.
If you are only a collection of chemical cycles whose specific physical manifestation wonders around reusing the same chemical detritus over and over, sharing it with the rest of the bubbles, then you don't have a body to preserve, so you don't have a tangible fixed form that requires, or can support, DNA mapping.
A bubbleform entity would not be in a death struggle for resources. Every time a bubble popped, it's resources would be returned to the bubbles around it. Competition wouldn't be for resources--they don't get pulled out of the genetic pool into some other genetic pool, as happens when, say, a bear eats a deer, it would be for maintaining the fidelity of the feedback cycles.
So, what this competition would produce, I suggest, is machinery that is good at sending feedback signals into chemical vats that cause them to produce appropriately more of whatever chemical is needed, specializing certain bubbles as it does so. Like mRNA, for example, or like Golgi bodies or other organelles to store and select the results. Or like ribosomes in reticulums to do the processing.
In other words, what I suggest is that what we see precipitated out as the machinery of reproduction, is the winner of a contest that had scads of entries as a hot, resource-rich, loosely contained community of allied chemical processes vied to remain in existence in a virtually unlimited sea of such entities with access to a virtually unlimited sea of resources.
No competition for resources means no need to preserve form in discrete bodies to hunt up said resources, and therefore, no need for tight preservation of form.
I'd suggest that what we have now is the precipitated-out result of this struggle, as the world flowed into a time when temperature has dropped and resources become scarce, and is the fossilized remains of a very different story. If you are not struggling for resources, but, rather, struggling against being buffeted out of existence, your problems are way different than our problems, and your form and function should be way different to reflect that. It shouldn't, therefore, be any surprise at all if DNA in discrete bodies looks way different than whatever preceeded it.
Different problems require different solutions.
...
Is this plausable?
Compared to prokariotes-from-junk theory: yes. I don't require a certifiable miracle at any point in this thesis. The prokariotes-from-junk theory leans mightily on the requirement for a miracle, regardless of which camp you are in.
Compared to the "highly plausable" requirements for the prize? No. I can't provide enough detailed explanation to feel I have made a "highly plausable" case. Just a plausable one, sans an explicit expectation of miracles.
Where is "ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL" in the bible? Is it listed in the section that gives the rules for slave-ownership? Is it in the part about how the Jews, being the chosen people, were to kill or drive off every other people in the Holy Land?
It can't be very difficult for someone who has surveyed all Nobel Prize winning work and has declared that it all disproves evolution. An intellect of such sweeping power should be able to give us his answer. HOW OLD IS THE EARTH?.
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