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."
And here I thought you were awake the last time we discussed this. MORPHOLOGICAL continuity to establish the tree is coorelated with major branch divisions of existing species, so that the HOMOLOGICAL relationships between their various fundamental, shared genomic enterprises, principally of the lesser ribosome, so far, can, in fact, be stacked against each other's HOMOLOGIES by mutational distance against the MORPHOLOGICAL story the bones tell. Your claim, if it held water, would be similar to claiming that you can't believe what an oscilloscope tells you because you aren't reading it in real time. You have been clinging to this primitivistic rejection of inductive reasoning for too long for me to take your obtuseness about this, at this point, as anything more than a propagandist ploy. Can't you come up with a genuine defense of your position?--I'm sort of tired of you making assertions like this, unshared by modern science, and then later claiming you've "proved" or "demonstrated" them, and that your doubts are the common coin of modern scientists. Hard as it may be for you to believe "assert" and "prove" are not the same thing, any more than finding the occasional science crank to agree with you is a mandate from science. Science, mr. Science reporter, acknowledged this business of examining mutational distance w/respect to family tree of presently existing species back in 2000, when we made fundamental alterations in the official Tree of Life, amid much ballyhoo. If there was any more of a problem of induction with this mechanism than there is with reading oscilloscopes, I'd have heard about it long before now.
No scientific evidence, eh? Tell me, what classification do mushrooms and jellyfish fall into? Are they multicellulars, or communities of single-cellulars? The evidence is abundant, and clear. While this argument might have traction for people who've never heard of a microscope, too much of the fundamental chemistry, structure, details of reproduction, and DNA in the cells of multicellulars, notibly, such as those for the ribosome, is shared with unicellulars for this argument to be taken at all seriously in present time.
Lovely. There really is no point if talking to gore, because he ignores the central requirement of discussion -- the attempt by each side to understand the other's position.
My mother called it manners and common decency.
I am perfectly within my rights to address straightening out your nomenclature, as well as your claims, in any order I care to.
Sounds to me like sexuality is a fairly obvious way to regularize the process of genetic exchange we observe in, for example, mushrooms, as they change from a chemically co-ordinated community into a physically congruous creature.
Good grief. Yet again you set up a hurdle no science acknowledges and fault science for failure to jump through your hurdle. Where do you find any claim that science thinks it's drawn up a comprehensive picture of dinos, or the time they lived in? This argument is a glaring example of your unwillingness to acknowledge the notion of thinking through inductive reasoning, and accepting it's accompanying unremediable uncertainty. Get over it. Do you claim there were no dinosaurs because we don't have any living examples? If so, than you have accepted the first step in a long chain of inductive reasoning from partial evidence to irredemably imperfect, and imperfectly detailed, conclusions.
Tell me, do you think the assumptions of physics are now a closed set, and that we have no more to learn about the fundamental nature of the universe? Do you think that before the time of Kepler our knowledge of astro-physics was any more comprehensive than the details of the Age of Dinos is to us now? Science operates on whatever shreds of evidence it has available. Science cannot be indicted for doing so, your attempts to the contrary notwithstanding.
You don't need my help for that.
The question is whether there is intelligence in the Universe.
Excuse me, but the original question was glaringly the Berkelerian classic: could the universe be the product of someone's imagination? The secondary question became: what is the essential difference between Berkeley's conjecture, and the conjecture that God created the heavens and the earth? You can talk about whatever you please, but don't mis-represent the history of my conversations.
You tried and failed to show that there is none in our reality.
No, I have not. As usual you are assuming I have made a common argument you're familiar with, from scanning a few snatches of the argument, with your usual spectacular vacuum of attention.
You then tried to assume that our life is a dream
I have not. I have suggested 1) that you, nor anyone else, can't prove otherwise, and 2) that this is remarkably similar to the claim that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. ie. dreamed them up.
and I pointed out that whatever this reality is it definitely had intelligence also because the dreamer must be intelligent.
So you claim, once again without offering any pursuasive evidence that this claim even means anything tangible.
Descartes's statement proves the existence of at least one intelligent being and that being is the one observing this thing we call the reality we live in.
You cannot make this true by claiming it over and over, any more than Descartes could.
Your whole argument on this point is the very reason for Occam's Razor. You are trying to put off an obvious conclusion by taking it to further and further levels. This is totally fruitless and does not change the results.
Occum's razor calls for abandoning the argument as anything more than an exercise in staying awake all night in the dorm. It doesn't help you put meat on the table to figure out whether or not reality is a dream, or that you exist as a codicil to your apparent ability to think. Occum's razor certainly does NOT prescribe the notion that intelligence must underwrite the universe, any more than it underwrites the necessary connection between thinking and being. These are extraneous, ornamental notions which the contingencies of life are not waiting on to be solved.
You can claim all you like but you have not backed it up in any way. I have asked for an example of a hypothesis which fits the scientifically known facts about living things showing how abiogenesis might be possible and have received no such example (in fact there is a million+ dollar prize for anyone who does just that). This is the slimest kind of scientific proof possible, which does not require any evidence, and materialists cannot even provide that. I think that that makes my statement that abiogenesis is scientifically impossible quite legitimate. Further, your statement below admits to as much:
What gibberish. A contest prize is NOT an example of science in action. Quite obviously contrary to your representation here, I have offered you an hypothesis reaching all the way back to lipid-world, that does not require the leap from amino acid junk, and quite obviously, despite your repeated simple-minded attempts to imply it, an instantaneous leap from amino acid junk is NOT a requirement of the hypothesis I've offered up.
I am not required to win a contest prize, or even qualify as an entrant, in order for this the be an hypothesis. An hypothesis, I might add, that stands on exactly the same evidence as the amino acid junk hypothesis, and with the same scientific standing, which is to say, not much.
A breakthru!--, even if accompanied by resentful, disdaneful, unlikely, and undemonstratable mutterings,-- you acknowledge a definition that's been rammed down your throat about six times. What a pleasure it is talking to someone so responsive.
There is no need to do that. You already conceded that the scientific community regards abiogenesis as scientifically impossible:
And no matter how many times you repeat that, it remains the case that instantaneous abiogenesis is disregarded in it's entirety, not acknowledged as proof that God created the universe.
Know who first came up with this phrase? Lord Byron, to warn people against polluting themselves by flagrant waltzing. But, then, the fellow was a gimp, you know, he couldn't have waltzed to save his life.
A quanta can be measured "directly". Want to think about that a little more?
I stink, therefore, I am.
A much more satisfying thesis, in my humble opinion.
I believe the specific Dr. Strangelove reference came from the anti-fluoridation movement. Prior to that I don't know.
Another scientific blueper?
Sure, ever heard of the photoelectric effect? Einstein got a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the law.
I don't doubt you do think it is more satisfying. However, there is a thriving industry in perfumes and deodorants. So you seem to be in the minority. I imagine that you must have a rather large "personal" zone around you. :^)
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