Posted on 07/09/2003 12:08:32 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
FORT WORTH, Texas - (KRT) -
The long-running debate over the origins of mankind continues Wednesday before the Texas State Board of Education, and the result could change the way science is taught here and across the nation.
Local and out-of-state lobbying groups will try to convince the board that the next generation of biology books should contain new scientific evidence that reportedly pokes holes in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Many of those groups say that they are not pushing to place a divine creator back into science books, but to show that Darwin's theory is far from a perfect explanation of the origin of mankind.
"It has become a battle ground," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of theNational Center of Science Education, which is dedicated to defending the teaching of evolution in the classroom.
Almost 45 scientists, educators and special interest groups from across the state will testify at the state's first public hearing this year on the next generation of textbooks for the courses of biology, family and career studies and English as a Second Language.
Approved textbooks will be available for classrooms for the 2004-05 school year. And because Texas is the second largest textbook buyer in the nation, the outcome could affect education nationwide.
The Texas Freedom Network and a handful of educators held a conference call last week to warn that conservative Christians and special interest organizations will try to twist textbook content to further their own views.
"We are seeing the wave of the future of religious right's attack on basic scientific principles," said Samantha Smoot, executive director of the network, an anti-censorship group and opponent of the radical right.
Those named by the network disagree with the claim, including the Discovery Institute and its Science and Culture Center of Seattle.
"Instead of wasting time looking at motivations, we wish people would look at the facts," said John West, associate director of the center.
"Our goal nationally is to encourage schools and educators to include more about evolution, including controversies about various parts of Darwinian theory that exists between even evolutionary scientists," West said. "We are a secular think tank."
The institute also is perhaps the nation's leading proponent of intelligent design - the idea that life is too complex to have occurred without the help of an unknown, intelligent being.
It pushed this view through grants to teachers and scientists, including Michael J. Behe, professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. The Institute receives millions of dollars from philanthropists and foundations dedicated to discrediting Darwin's theory.
The center sent the state board a 55-page report that graded 11 high school biology textbooks submitted for adoption. None earned a grade above a C minus. The report also includes four arguments it says show that evolutionary theory is not as solid as presented in biology textbooks.
Discovery Institute Fellow Raymond Bohlin, who also is executive director of Probe Ministries, based in Richardson, Texas, will deliver that message in person Wednesday before the State Board of Education. Bohlin has a doctorate degree in molecular cell biology from the University of Texas at Dallas.
"If we can simply allow students to see that evolution is not an established fact, that leaves freedom for students to pursue other ideas," Bohlin said. "All I can do is continue to point these things out and hopefully get a group that hears and sees relevant data and insist on some changes."
The executive director of Texas Citizens for Science, Steven Schafersman, calls the institute's information "pseudoscience nonsense." Schafersman is an evolutionary scientist who, for more than two decades, taught biology, geology, paleontology and environmental science at a number of universities, including the University of Houston and the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
"It sounds plausible to people who are not scientifically informed," Schafersman said. "But they are fraudulently trying to deceive board members. They might succeed, but it will be over the public protests of scientists."
The last time Texas looked at biology books, in 1997, the State Board of Education considered replacing them all with new ones that did not mention evolution. The board voted down the proposal by a slim margin.
The state requires that evolution be in textbooks. But arguments against evolution have been successful over the last decade in other states. Alabama, New Mexico and Nebraska made changes that, to varying degrees, challenge the pre-eminence of evolution in the scientific curriculum.
In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education voted to wash the concepts of evolution from the state's science curricula. A new state board has since put evolution back in. Last year, the Cobb County school board in Georgia voted to include creationism in science classes.
Texas education requirements demand that textbooks include arguments for and against evolution, said Neal Frey, an analyst working with perhaps Texas' most famous textbook reviewers, Mel and Norma Gabler.
The Gablers, of Longview, have been reviewing Texas textbooks for almost four decades. They describe themselves as conservative Christians. Some of their priorities include making sure textbooks include scientific flaws in arguments for evolution.
"None of the texts truly conform to the state's requirements that the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories be presented to students," Frey said.
The Texas textbook proclamation of 2001, which is part of the standard for the state's curriculum, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, requires that biology textbooks instruct students so they may "analyze, review and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weakness using scientific evidence and information."
The state board is empowered to reject books only for factual errors or for not meeting the state's curriculum requirements. If speakers convince the state board that their evidence is scientifically sound, members may see little choice but to demand its presence in schoolbooks.
Proposed books already have been reviewed and approved by Texas Tech University. After a public hearing Wednesday and another Sept. 10, the state board is scheduled to adopt the new textbooks in November.
Satisfying the state board is only half the battle for textbook publishers. Individual school districts choose which books to use and are reimbursed by the state unless they buy texts rejected by the state board.
Districts can opt not to use books with passages they find objectionable. So when speakers at the public hearings criticize what they perceived as flaws in various books - such as failing to portray the United States or Christianity in a positive light - many publishers listen.
New books will be distributed next summer.
State Board member Terri Leo said the Discovery Institute works with esteemed scientists and that their evidence should be heard.
"You cannot teach students how to think if you don't present both sides of a scientific issue," Leo said. "Wouldn't you think that the body that has the responsibility of what's in the classroom would look at all scientific arguments?"
State board member Bob Craig said he had heard of the Intelligent Design theory.
"I'm going in with an open mind about everybody's presentation," Craig said. "I need to hear their presentation before I make any decisions or comments.
State board member Mary Helen Berlanga said she wanted to hear from local scientists.
"If we are going to discuss scientific information in the textbooks, the discussion will have to remain scientific," Berlanga said. "I'd like to hear from some of our scientists in the field on the subject."
Yes, a lie
I guess that's what Darwin gets for quoting a CREATIONIST, and giving credence to an anthropological doctrine devised by CREATIONISTS, and citing anthopological data collected by a CREATIONIST.
But we're supposed to ignore all that, right?, 'cause there just couldn't have been any scientific racism before Darwin. (Even though there was.)
Sounds like your son is doing great! Whoohoooo!
No, that's not quite right; look at p.9, footnote 28 in the link I posted earlier: Ape in God's image. It looks a whole lot like a gene with a single mutation.
Now look at the same page, notes 31 and 32. Don't they look a whole lot alike, except for a single difference?
To reproduce garbage which is essentially what you are talking about, just so that evolutionists nowadays could use it
Just so that evos could use it? Aren't these mutations really there? Anyone can use it.
but also a denial of a central part of their theory - that unfitness is destroyed.
What is unfit about having non-coding dna? It may be a problem for bacteria, who need to reproduce very fast, but how is it a problem for metazoa?
That part which is outside the genes is the part which the evolutionists moronically and/or dishonestly called 'junk DNA'. And indeed it is correct to call their assertion 'moronic and/or dishonest'. It should have been obvious (and indeed was) to many scientists and even non-scientists, that genes have to be regulated and that such regulation required very specific controls. That is the massive job which your 'junk DNA' does.
So why does something which is identical to one of the genes needed for ascorbic acid synthesis (except for one base-pair) regulate development in primates, but in other mammals just helps make vitamin C? Are you saying it evolved into a regulatory function because it wan't needed any more? Just what are you claiming? That all noncoding dna is regulatory? that none of it is 'junk'?
Now that it has been found that at least one pseudogene plays a functional role, can pseudogene functionality be used as evidence against evolution? Evidently not if you’re committed to Darwinism. In the same journal article that uncovered the functional role of Makorin1-p1 we find the following after-the-fact explanation: “Indeed, it [the functioning pseudogene] suggests that evolutionary forces can work in both directions. The forward direction is driven by pressures to create new genes from existing ones, an imperfect process that often generates defective copies of the original. But these defective copies need not be evolutionary dead ends, because pressures in the reverse direction could modify them for specific tasks.” (Hirotsune, et al., 2003)
So, at least one pseudo gene has a use; therefore they all do? BTW, isn't this an example of a gene being hijacked into an entirely new function? Haven't you claimed that this is impossible?
What sort of research would you propose to show that the defective gene needed for vitamin c synthesis in the great apes and people really serves a purpose, and isn't just a fossil showing that we share a common ancestor with the rest of the grerat apes?
Not to be too elliptical, Gobineau is widely credited with being the "father" of the pernicious racial theories that led to Hitler.Studied this at George Mason University (working on a MA in History just for kicks) two years ago under Dr. Peter Black, Chief Historian for the Holocaust Museum in DC. Sold all the textbooks on eBay and am wracking my brain to remember what Dr. Black said were the anticedents to Hitler-style anti-Semitism.
Really? Well then, I was wondering what you think of Leonard Peikoff's take on Hitler's philosophical foundations?
Reality, declares Hegel, is inherently contradictory; it is a systematic progression of colliding contradictions organized in triads of thesis, antithesis, synthesis - and men must think accordingly. They should not strive for old-fasioned, "static" consistency. They should not be "limited" by the "one-sided" Aristotelian view that every existent has a specific identity, that things are what they are, that A is A. On the contrary, they owe their ultimate allegiance to a higher principle: the principle of the "identity of opposites," the principle that things are not what they are, that A is non-A.Hegel describes the above as a new conception of "reason," and as a new, "dialectic" logic.
...True reality, he holds, is a nonmaterial dimension, beyond time and space and human sense-perception. In Hegel's version, reality is a dynamic cosmic mind or thought-process, which in various contexts is referred to as the Absolute, the Spirit, the World-Reason, God, etc. According to Hegel, it is in the essential nature of this entity to undergo a constant process of evolution or development, unfolding itself in various stages. In one of these stages, the Absolute "externalizes" itself, assuming the form of a material world. Continuing its career, it takes on the appearance of a multiplicity of human beings, each seemingly distinct from the others, each seemingly an autonomous individual with his own personal thoughts and desires.
The appearance of such separate individuals represents, however, merely a comparatively low stage in the Absolute's career. It is not the final truth about reality. It does not represent the culmination of the Absolute's development. At that stage, i.e., at the apex or climax of reality, it turns out, in Hegel's view, that distinctions of any kind, including the distinctions between mind and matter and between one man and another, are unreal....
The ethics and politics which Hegel derives from his fundamental philosophy can be indicated by two sentences from his Philosophy of Right: "A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it."
...
The state-organism is no mere secular entity. As a manifestation of the Absolute, it is a creature of God, and thus demands not merely obedience from its citizens but reverential worship. "The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth." "The march of God in the world, that is what the state is." The purpose of the state, therefore, is not the protection of its citizens. The state is not a means to any human end. As an entity with supernatural credentials, it is "an absolute unmoved end in itself," and it "has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state."
The above are the kinds of political ideas which Hegel, more than any other man, injected into the mind of early nineteenth-century Germany.
...
The direct source of the Nazi racial ideas was the theoreticians of racism.... These men accepted wholeheartedly the collectivist sentiment of the period's intellectuals, and then sought to gain for that sentiment the appearance of scientific support - by translating collectivism into the language of the favorite science of the time, biology. The result was a mounting torrent on the following order (from Vacher de Lapouge, a nineteenth-century French Aryan-glorifier): "The blood which one has in one's veins at birth one keeps all one's life. The individual is stifled by his race and is nothing. The race, the nation, is all." No amount of passion for biology (or for Darwin) could produce such an utterance. A dose of Hegel, however, could.
What the theoreticians of racism did was to secularize the Hegelian approach, as Karl Popper explains eloquently. Marx, he observes:
replaced Hegel's "Spirit" by matter, and by material and economic interests. In the same way, racialism substitutes for Hegel's "Spirit" something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race. Instead of "Spirit," Blood is the self-developing essence; instead of "Spirit," Blood is the Sovereign of the world, and displays itself on the Stage of History; and instead of "Spirit," the Blood of a nation determines its essential destiny.The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism. It only gives it a tinge of biology and of modern evolutionism. [Karl Popper, 1962, The Open Society and its Enemies]
I got a ride in a "Buff" (B-52) clear back in the 70's. Indeed it is a bid bird.
You: First of all, your pinging me on this at least implies that you include me in the above slander.
NO, I was hoping that you'd have something to say to als. btw #2497 doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Oh well
how come evolutionists supposedly do not mean what they say according to you and other evos on this thread? Are evolutionist authors inveterate liars?
Now you've lost me entirely.
You and I both have a defective gene needed for vitamin c synthesis; we both inherited it from our parents. So does every chimp; same defect, same inheritence. Isn't the most obvious conclusion that we and the chimp have a common ancestor, who passed the defect on to its descendants? Why isn't this the most obvious scenario?
Gobineau's "The Inequality of Human Races" was published in 1853.
Indeed. Gobineau's book was THE bible of 19th Century racism. We probably shouldn't mention that he was a creationist.
An English translation of this book, by the American polygenist Josiah Nott (and another fellow whose name escapes me, but who went on to become a propagandist in Europe for the Confederacy), was published in America in 1858, two or three years before the first American edition of The Origin.
Nott took the trouble to include a postscript correcting the one error, as he saw it, in Gobineau's book: the notion that negroes, and other inferior races, were the same species as white folk.
In fairness I should also note that Nott was a "freethinking" non-Christian who distained Genesis as obviously unscientific. At the same time he was a bit disappointed at the difficulty he had stirring up controversy among American parsons, who often clucked at his infidelity while substantially agreeing with his view of race.
Nott and other polygenists did have a strong opponent -- on both scientific and biblical grounds -- in the Harvard botanist, and evangelical Christian, Asa Gray. Gray would soon become the leading champion of evolution on the American scene -- in part because Darwin's theory undermined the racist science of the polygenists.
Thanks. Please stick to your word.
ALS has presented evidence on his position of belief in The Bible, using biblical passages and quotes to backup his assertions. I'm assuming from your question that you do not recognize The Bible as being a credible source, so we are not going to be in agreement about what is 'evidence'.
I never said, nor am I saying, that ALS has presented evidence on scientific beliefs. As many have said here, science is not religion and religion is not science.
How wonderfully true A-G! Same can be said for all of us.
I noticed no response to this...why is that?
AWESOME!!!
Yeah, you just NEVER present any facts or documentation when questioned...you mean old diswuptah you! :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.