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."
How else can truth be made? It is a concept.
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 have not read - nor even looked for the existence of - a biogenesis theory authored by Behe or Dembski. And Yockey's work is a falsification of abiogenesis, he does not offer an alternative and instead says that life should be taken as an axiom. Rocha is working on an abiogenesis theory with eyes wide open to the obstacles of which there are many.
IMHO, at this state of the art, it takes faith to say either one: that God created life or that life arose naturally from non-life.
Given many random distributions of the reactivity of a RNA sequence space, we could study how easily can reactive sequences be constructed from RNA edition of non-reactive molecules. A study of this process is forthcoming.
I don't know whether Rocha's mechanism will bear up under experimentation, but if it does, it'll nicely fit with my hypothesis that algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design because whereas it is a proposed mechanism for abiogeneis, the mechanism itself is akin to a finite state machine and thus may tilt to the manifestation of an algorithmic step-by-step instruction. And that's my opinion, which I am also welcome to!
Interesting thing to say. I'll agree that truth is a concept, to the extent that anything a human can think about is a concept. I don't think it follows that the universe does not manifest behaviors all on its own, whether humans think about it or not, which humans can, more or less accurately, ascribe truth to their descriptions of.
You can't call it genetic information if you don't have any genes. In my opinion, RNA is also too complicated to be the initial genesis of life. The first "signaling" across a barrier, as I have suggested, could have simply been differentials in tension between bubbles. Lipids, I therefore suggest, preceeded RNA.
I do think Rocha is on the mark, however, in pointing out that it is very key that some RNA is stable, and some is not. Notibly, mRNA is not stable. For lipid world, (which, I've posited, started into the signaling busines by passing long-chain hydrophobic/philics to understocked neighboring bubbles) stability of signal would be a death sentence. If you want to regulate chemical production in a feedback loop, you cannot send a signal to the factory floor that endures forever.
If you calculate the odds against prokariotes leaping suddenly into existence, assembled from coal tar, and conclude it to be highly unlikely, you are assuming a theory of biogenesis in order to refute it.
IMHO, it takes faith to believe an oscilloscope is telling you the truth about a signal. Science is a faith-based undertaking.
Um, aren't all the signals we receive from distant stars millions to billions of years old, just like fossils?
Well, the monitor in front of your face is not a concept(at least I think so), but rights and truth are.
Sure it is, and it requires a substantial amount of ideation, both for me to recognize what class of thing it is, and for the designers to have produced it. The concreteness of a particular manifestation of a thing is no sure measure of its objective existence. I'm convinced of the objective existence of the law of gravity outside of human perception of it, for instance. I am less sure about rights and truth having cooresponding objective manifestation outside the realm of human perception, but I am open to demonstration, as soon as anyone can think of a persuasvie experiment.
How is that different from observing lots of fossils, and lining them up by morphological similarity to observe that the morphological sequence matches the chronological sequence and bridging the gaps in the story by assumption?
I have no opinion with regard to the scenario you outline at 6186. My interest is with the origin of life itself – the issues addressed by The Gene Emergence Project
Thanks for the discussion!
So it goes away when you go to sleep?
No. And if there is something objective for the concepts of gravity or truth to correspond to, they don't go away when I'm asleep, either.
I think you guys have your terminology messed up. I posted this somewhere, about 10 days ago. It may be useful here:
One can "believe" in the existence of the tooth fairy, but one does not -- in the same sense of the word -- "believe" in the existence of his mother. Belief in the first proposition (tooth fairy) requires faith, the belief in something for which there is no evidence or logical proof. The second proposition (mother) is that kind of knowledge which follows from sensory evidence. There is also that kind of knowledge (like the Pythagorean theorem) which follows from a logical proof. In between mother and the Pythagorean theorem are those propositions we provisionally accept (or in common usage "believe"), like relativity and evolution, because they are scientific theories -- logical and falsifiable explanations of the available data (which data is knowledge obtained via sensory evidence).
How do you know?
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