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."
It has been proven - the bacterial flagellum. Regarding it disproving evolution, yes it does, it fits Darwin's own statement of what would refute evolution.
Thanks for the insult! Shows quite well that my statement was correct, therefore your concession on the point that genetics, DNA and the proven complexity of living organisms disprove evolution is deeply appreciated.
Thanks for more insults! I shall take it as another concession, this time on the fact that evolutionists are using the intentions of opponents to suppress the truth. Thanks again!
Last I heard Caucasians, Negros and Mongoloids are not considered different species. Further, even though these races have been around for quite a while, none of them has evolved into a different species either.
Poor Blueman, what you need is for god to come down and say, I DID this!! Go ahead, let us know when he does that, because when he does, we'll know when to put you in the rubber room.
I may need one of those rubber rooms, too! Please check out the "Creation" section of my post 324! You see, I think He did speak to us, and it is recorded in the Cosmic Microwave Background. So move over, Gore3000... LOL!
Which textbooks would that be? Are you aware that "Darwin's Finches" was published quite recently?
The book I am referring to was published in the 1980's, it won a Pulitzer prize. Hardly a book that has received no notice. Therefore the continued claim that they are different species in textbooks is thoroughly despicable and a lie.
However, the original claim that Darwin's finches were separate species was made way back in the 1930's with as I said the claimants not bothering to check if they could mate with each other and the evolutionists repeating the lie without question profusely in textbooks after that. It shows the total dishonesty of evolutionists as well as the total lack of scientific inquiry in so called evo-science.
It was in "no way" overly confident, huh? But you sure seemed confident (confident enough to "assure" lil ol' me!), indeed one might even say overly so, in thinking I was talking about Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis. After all, I was not. So wasn't your confidence, shall we say, misplaced?
So, that's one way in which you were overly confident. By my count, anyway....
It is a simple statement of fact that the Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis does not apply to fluid dynamics.
Yes, that it is. It also doesn't have squat to do with what I was talking about, which by the way was a minor example of a minor tangential point. This is the "misunderstanding" and "confusion" I lamented in my previous post to you. To think that continually mentioning Cantor in this thread is likely to shed light on the issue at hand is bound to cause confusion and misunderstanding, and only that.
I knew this for a fact; hence your characterization that it was "carelessly" tossed out is in error.
I didn't think the original query you made to me about what I meant by "continuum hypothesis" was careless at all. Given the double-usage it was quite reasonable and you were quite gracious. Go back and you'll see I responded in kind.
Your "I can assure you that..." post was pretty careless though, I would say, because you were "assuring" me in lecture-style of some extraneous irrelevant fact. Even after I had already explained what I meant by "continuum hypothesis", you assumed that your "assurances" about Cantor was somehow relevant, but it was not. In that way you were certainly careless, by the plain meaning of that English word.
But even then I chose to let it slide, no biggie. Go back and look at my response to "I can assure you that". I (the "most obnoxious FR poster you've ever seen") thanked you for keeping me honest. (Yup it doesn't get any more obnoxious than that, I sure hate being thanked for my errors :)
It's just that even after your error was pointed out, explained, dissected, thanked, and smiley-faced away, you couldn't let it die. I'm sorry but I'm just sick of cleaning up and dealing with post after post of irrelevant stuff about Cantor.
From the context of your remark, it seemed as though you were referring to Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis,
It sure "seemed" so to you, apparently. Of course, you were wrong. You proceeded from this incorrect presumption and "assured" me of something which was irrelevant. Understand your carelessness now?
which made no sense.
Of course it made no sense. You interpreted my words carelessly even after I explained them thoroughly.
I responded with a neutral, humorous comment about the confusion of two different fields using the same nomenclature for different things
The humorous content of your statement is debatable. Anyway, all I really said about that statement is that it was "chauvinistic" (nothing really wrong with that in my book) and "boring". Admittedly the latter is a judgment call on my part. I guess you think those types of jokes are exciting. To each his own....
it didn't blame you, it didn't critisize you, and it didn't belittle you,
Never thought it did. But thanks for making it clear just the same.
but you nonetheless go off on a friggin' tizzy like somebody killed your poodle.
That's just not funny. Somebody did kill my poodle!
(Ok, here I'm demonstrating the type of joke I suppose I prefer to tired old "engineers v. mathematicians" faculty-lounge fodder. Thus proving I have a rather dark sense of humor, I guess, so you shouldn't feel too bad that your 'humor' wasn't a hit with me ;-)
I didn't know what "your field" was when I made it,
Didn't think you did.
I could care less at this point what "field" you are in.
You could? That's sweet.
You are arguably the single most obnox[...]
Oh wait, I've commented on this part already. Anyway, I still think it's fascinating you came to this conclusion after receiving exactly one negative response from me, the previous two being sincere and polite. Guess I'd have been better off telling you where to stuff your Cantor from the get-go?
P.S. This concludes my interaction with you,
It's so funny when posters say this. Why do you say this? For the drama of it? It'll be clear that our interaction is concluded by the fact that you don't respond to me, right? I really don't think this kind of opus announcement of the momentous historical fact is needed. But it was probably fun to write for you, so there's that. Best,
You have once again proved yourself an able desciple of the principle of retrospective astonishment. Anything can look highly improbable if you refuse to consider all the possible alternatives that never came to fruition because you did.
All science is about disproving randomness. Science seeks (and finds!) cause and effect, therefore every new scientific - in any science - is a disproof of randomness.
When all else fails make a vague, unsubstantiated charge so that the victim of the attack is unable to refute it. Put up or shut up, tell me what unanswerd post you think refutes something that I have said.
therefore every new scientific - in any science - is a disproof of randomness.
A good point! However, the theory of evolution calls for gradual, natural selection from random mutations. Therefore, IMHO, if the randomness pillar fails either the overall theory is in deep trouble or seriously crippled.
The strange thing is that this is not coming from intelligent design theorists or creationists - it's the observations being made by information theorists (and mathematicians.)
There must be information content from first cause - but there are no natural origins for such information. Further, the process requires symbols (self/non-self, friend/foe) - i.e. significant information content.
Algorithms are counter-indicative of randomness per se (Kolmogorov/Chaitin).
He most certainly is, he is a cell biologist with enough publication credit to choke a horse, and a professor of biology at Brown.
As I showed, the article he wrote was a complete plagiarism of an internet article written at least two years ago.
No such thing has occured. Miller was cited in the article to which you refer. You have become feverish and need to lie down.
He has also been refuted by Behe several times in his attempts to prove irreducible complexity to be false.
Behe resists attempts to get him to lock horns with Miller, or any other of his truly competent, well-versed critics for the very good reason that he was caught with his hands in the cookie jar when he predicted things regarding irreducible complexity which would not occur in journals that had already occured before Behe's book was published.
Contrary to your contention, Miller does not attempt to disprove irreducible complexity, he merely demonstrates that it isn't proven. There is a vast gulf between proven and disproven you seem to have great deal of trouble navigating.
Proof by Constant Repetition, eh? You have a table of all the possible configurations of off-by-one-molecule machines that fail to wiggle a flagellums' tail, however efficiently? No? Or perhaps you have the proof that demonstrates that genetic machinery can't be built by a process similar to the way the immune system builds phagocytic machines out of a machine shop of generalized parts? Talk about the dog eating the homework.
Unless my memory is failing me, the observers who wrote "Darwin's Finches" made quite an extensive study of all the breeding going on in the Galapagos, including of crossbreeds, and their conclusions were not that the crossbreeds were more highly successful than the purebreeds, contrary to what you've suggested.
As I've already pointed out to you, speciation is largely a distinction of degree, not class. Being able to interbreed marginally is not an empedement to being properly classified as a set of separate species. The distinction is an arbitrary, artificial human one with no distinct, easily recognized, universally accepted boundary.
Are teacup poodles and mastiffs of the same species or distinct species? Depends whether you ask DNA researchers and en vitreo specialists or paleontologists and dog breeders.
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