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."

One little problem with Darwin's finches is also not mentioned in textbooks - they are not separate species. They can interbreed and do interbreed.

Which textbooks would that be? Are you aware that "Darwin's Finches" was published quite recently?

The progeny of the 'mixed' breeds are even more viable and produce more progeny than those of unmixed breeds.

You'll forgive me if I am skeptical that the point of the book was ever that these finch species were fully differentiated.

Since the finch beaks are evolved to fit up to specific physical problems in aquiring their diet, you'll forgive me if I am somewhat skeptical of the notion that, after selection, the mixed populations proved more viable than the purebreds.

. Whether due to incompetence, or willful fraud,

Good grief, what a drama queen. I'm sure thousands of biological scientists conspired to hide the unbelievably horrible fact that finches will occasionally try to interbreed. Must have been quite expense maintaining this vast finch conspiracy.

evolutionists have been saying for decades that these were separate species

Speciation is a gradual, partial thing. Only in comic book simplifications of evolutionary theory is it supposed that one species produces another flash/bang/boom. Speciation in action is a gradual attenuation of interbreeding capacity between populations.

What you are objecting to is the violation of an imaginary barrier, which only exists for the purpose of simplifying the theory enough to explain it to children and desultorily interested adults. The finches are differentiated enough to make a reasonable case. Cats and dogs have been known to produce breathing offspring. Do you wish to forward the claim that cats and dogs are identical species? How about donkeys and horses? How about camels and llamas? How about adjacent Herring Gulls that can interbreed with their immediate neighbors in the other directions, but not with each other? Should we declare each time zone's Herring Gulls to be a separate species?

As with so many creationist arguments, this is raising a barrier based on a far too simplistic model of what is actually being said and demonstrated by scientists.

I'm sorry. Did I posit something opposed to this gem?

...as offered as an argument in rebuttal of a suggestion that evolutionary theory seems fairly accurate? Yes, you did.

Reliability depends upon scientific method, and the latter cannot apply to theories of origins.

Sure it can. Where do you think stellar evolutionary theory comes from? Where do you think the Big Bang theory comes from? Where do you think Bode's law of planetary formation comes from?

Too bad evolutionists are so intent upon limiting themselves to purely natural explanations.

That is to say, theories that can be tested using material evidence? Yea, what a shame.

Please look beyond a convenient dictionary entry and see for yourself what Pasteur did. It's not all that complicated.

You look at it. Spontaneous generation means life from non-life. Pasteur proved that a combination of non-living things would not produce a living thing. That's part of the equation against abiogenesis - like evolution no one has shown it to happen EVER. Now in real life, not in the fairy tales of materialists, that science has never seen a thing happen does matter.

The discovery of DNA and the chemical basis of organisms 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.

Before Woehler produced urea, Vitalism was accepted "axiomatically" as Tribune7 would have said and many scientists were convinced that the fact that so many experiments could not produce organic compounds proved Vitalism to be true.

You act as if Vitalism has been disproven when it has not been. Science does not know what life is. There is no difference in the DNA of an organism one minute before and one minute after death. Also see my post above about abiogenesis. It is not - as you imply - based on ignorance. It is based on what science knows now. Abiogenesis is just a fairy tale for materialists.

When a theory (or a pillar of a theory) is falsified, is it necessary to have a substitute in hand?

Most likely not, but falsification is a nuanced thing. If we have the werewithal to be sure that the falsefication is definitive, we likely are actively working on the replacement already. The perihelion of mercury experiment comes to mind.

In other words, if the randomness pillar were falsified tomorrow, I suspect there would not be a quick agreement on a replacement.

Actually, I'd suggest that this is pretty close to being rather in the same condition as pertained for the perihelion of mercury experiment. I did not originate the idea that mutation could be naturalistically directed. It is an idea that has been crouching around the periphery for a while now because of various timeline discrepencies between the fossil clock and the DNA mutation rate clock, and the untoward apparent longevity of some of the new entries in the Tree of Life.

Your suggestion of random selection from a poplation with a central tendency could be one, but wouldn't there be others?

Well, sure. My personal opinion is that divine intervention or panspermia or both are now, on the available evidence, more likely candidates than spontaneous generation on this planet.

The other question, however, is: "is the candidate ready to be put on the scientific table?" We don't accept default explanations in science. If an hypothesis can't hold its water against the various criteria required of a scientific thesis, we are just going to have the let the problem go until we're way smarter.

If you have evidence of God, then by all means subject it to the same rigorous investigation as the Theory of Evolution.

If one is to consider what is the most probable - that species are designed or that they evolved then the theory of design has evolution beat hands down. For example, no one ever wishes to answer my question about how reptiles supposedly changed their way of reproducing from eggs to live bearing WHILE CONTINUING TO REPRODUCE ALL THE TIME. You answer that one, then we can talk about whether evolution has any validity at all. And BTW - answer with no perhaps, maybes, or possiblies, provide proven scientific facts as to how such an enormous change arose in an evolutionary manner.

"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."

Nice way of expressing a closed mind.

Proximate hypotheses: explanations of how things work or develop. Ultimate hypotheses: explanations of why things are the way they are. Why should not both be allowed in scientific method? Why in your little world must these two must be so strictly separated?

Furthermore, what makes one so much smarter to rule out what has not yet been observed? Do you really think Einstein had all the answers, when he could scarcely believe his own work? Are you sure all those millions of pages of evolution theory have it all covered? How long have you been on this planet? Were you there when the continents were set adrift? Have you any doubts at all?

All responses, as with the past responses, shall be considered as deriving from beneath the sand.

"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 hope I have not fallen short of expressing my sincere doubt when it comes to the capacity of science, etc. What? You say a simple summary would be okay, then in your next sentence you wish I would supply a discourse on "the definition of a theory" and the "principles of cause and effect."

Certainly you do not expect "conversational decorum" from a fellow primate, do you? What purpose would it serve? Do I even owe you a simple summary? As said before, I will gladly wear your arbitray labels if only to forego the chore of satisfying the voracious apetite of an intellectual black hole.

As stated here, irreducible complexity's a transcendental claim of zero scientific merit.

No it is not. The laws of probability show quite well that something is practically impossible. When the scientific facts about something are sufficiently well known - such as with the bacterial flagellum, a claim that it could not have arisen by blind chance (which is what evolutionists say) is unscientific. In fact, science is not about blind chance, it is about causation, so all the claims of evolutionists are unscientific. Further, because of the numerous examples of intelligent design in living organisms, all those problems cannot be waved away with 'but it could have happened'. The succession of totally ridiculous probabilites being necessary for evolution to be true makes the theory itself totally ridiculous.

This is just a long-winded way of avoiding making your claim explicitly, so that it can be easily seen, which is that DNA whopped into existence from simple organic molecules with no intermediate steps. There is nothing compelling about this claim. you don't know how DNA came to be; so you don't know squat about how hard it was to do.

My claim is explicit enough. There is no necessity to the order of DNA just as there is no necessity to the order of letters in a book. This is a scientifically proven fact. To say that a string of DNA at least 250,000 bases long arose by chance is utterly impossible and neither you nor anyone can show how such an occurrence, as well as all the concomitants of a living cell (because you need a living cell for reproduction) could have arisen from inert matter could have ever happened. It is the old chicken and egg problem which materialists can never answer - you need both a cell plus a very long string of DNA to get life and you cannot have one without the other.

Thank you for your post!

IMHO, information theorists (not I.D.ers) will force the issue fairly soon. Driven by the demand to compare genomes - or to treat or prevent viruses, biological WMDs, AIDS and cancer - the information theorists who specialize in molecular biology will be discovering and mapping genetic information content, symbols and algorithms.

It will be quite interesting to see how the biological sciences community recognizes the apparent falsification of randomness in the theory of evolution. My prediction: they will neither declare the theory falsified nor formulate a replacement theory.

"...as offered as an argument in rebuttal of a suggestion that evolutionary theory seems fairly accurate? Yes, you did."

Oh. You mean the communism thing? Like, somehow associating evolutionism with communism has no bearing on the validity of the former? Both are equally depsicable, laughable, damnable. BTW, I've further researched your specious disclaimer WRT to Stalin and evoltionism. Nice, hair-splitting try.

"Where do you think stellar evolutionary theory comes from?"

It is but a preconceived notion, with preconceived experiments and preconcieved results to bear it out while maintaining a smugness bereft of all emotion.

"That is to say, theories that can be tested using material evidence?"

With that kind of wishful thinking I have good reason to believe Santa Claus will visit you this year. Let me know when you have the eight-million-year old scene set up.

And there are known auto-catalytic RNAs that are, IIRC, less than 100 bases long.

They are not organisms, they are not self-replicating organisms. Science tells us that the smallest living, self reproducing organisms are some 1,000,000 DNA bases long. Some scientists say that it might be possible to have a self-replicating living organism with half that amount of DNA but none would go much lower than that. Also, you keep repeating the Miller-Urey lie - amino acids do not make DNA. DNA makes RNA which makes amino acids which when strung together properly make proteins.

Ken Miller is pre-eminent in biology. We don't let steet people write our principle college biology textbooks.

Ken Miller is not a scientist. As I showed, the article he wrote was a complete plagiarism of an internet article written at least two years ago. He has also been refuted by Behe several times in his attempts to prove irreducible complexity to be false.

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.

It is not speculation, the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly comples. You knock out any of the 40+ genes in it and the system does not work, period. That is a scientifically proven fact. The bacterial flagellum is therefore irreducibly complex. The response of evolutionists that 'the dog ate my homework' is what is total nonsense.

Intelligent design is the lazy man's way of explaining what they do not understand.

Look at how complicated this is, god must have done it.

Intellectually vacant.

So easy, but no scientific PROOF behind any of it.

SHOW me where a MAJORITY of Scientists agree with ID and we can talk about it being scientific, but you can't, so we won't.

You are just so easy, you spout garbage and expect it to be taken as gospel. Sorry Charlie, but your opinions are just that, OPINIONS, science does not accept you worldview, but a MAJORITY of scientists accept Evolution. Hmm, I wonder why that is?

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