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."
That of course is not the definition of evolution. The above is a cowardly mistatement of it. You cannot create new genetic information by just shuffling genetic information around. A bacteria has some 600 genes and some one million base pairs of DNA, a human has some 30,000 genes and some 3 billion base pairs of DNA. You cannot get from a bacteria to a human (as evolution asserts) by just shuffling around the genes of a bacteria and you know it and everybody knows it.
It was answered and if you had bothered to click on the 'replies' button you would have found the answer, but then you did not really want to hear my response did you? Here it is:
Tell you what: I'll start work on that, as soon as you show me the proof that naturalistic abiogenesis could only have occurred by the spontaneous intantaneous transmutation of junkyard piles of misc. amino acids into working prokariotes, as you and Behe insist must be the case.
Nope, me and Behe say that God made life. It is the atheists and materialists that say that junkyard piles of amino acids (which BTW are not found in nature except in living things as part of the process of protein formation) randomly arranged themselves into DNA or RNA chains of some half a million bases long (even though amino acids are the product of RNA not the material from which it is made). It is to such ridiculous extent that atheists and materialists try to go in order to deny God his due.
1001 posted on 12/23/2002 8:54 PM PST by gore3000
Let me add this note to the response above. It is the Intelligent Design community that has been telling evolutionists that you a hurricane going through a junkyard will never make a Boeing 747. It is proof of the total bankrupcy (and dishonesty) of evolution and evolutionists that they are adopting this as their argument against intelligent design. As I keep saying, evolution dead, all that is left is to bury it.
I do not debate religion with atheists. Evolutionists claim that evolution is science, but whenever I try to discuss science with them they try to turn the discussion into a religious one. Sorry, as I said before, I will not do that. Evolution is not science and your insults and your attempt at diverting the discussion to religion show quite well that it is not.
Which Patrick Henry ably challenged for me in Post 1055. These discoverers, inventors, and philosophers would have found the exact same thing regardless of the use of religion or God as an axiom. To say that it was essential is false.
Gore 3000 give up and quit lying about me.
I did not lie about you, I proved you a liar. You could have used this post to show my statement to be wrong but instead you write a bunch of rhetoric and nonsense and do not answer any of the points I said had not been refuted. In the post you are responding to I said:
Correction - you wrote page after page of ATTEMPTED refutations of my posts. The reason you gave up was that you were unable to back up your claims when I challenged you to do so in Post# 988 where I challenged you to give proof of evolutionary transformations and disprove the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, you were also unable to respond to my challenge in Post# 989 to show how an egg laying animal would become a live bearing one, and you were unable to respond to my challenge in Post# 991 to show detailed proof contradicting Behe's statement in post #984 that the eye spot could not have evolved as Darwin had claimed.
Seems to me that it is I who should be saying that you are disregarding the strong proofs against evolution which have been presented to you and which you are unable to refute.
Now where did you refute those posts? They are totally unanswered. Where is the refutation to Post# 988, 989 and 991 which said:
Neither you nor any evolutionists has ever given proof that a single species has transformed itself into another more complex species. If I am wrong, let's see the proof. Come up with a real arguement that slams evolution can you do it?
There are many. The bacterial flagellum is one. The program by which a single cell at conception turns into a 100 trillion cells at the time of birth - with every single cell of the exactly proper kind in the exactly proper place is another. There are many more which have been scientifically proven, but these two should keep you busy for a while.
988 posted on 12/23/2002 7:07 AM PST by gore3000
'Gradual loss of egg laying' is more easily said than done. You must remember that the you need to provide nutrition to the developing organism throughout its development - as well as after the birth until it can feed itself. To say that all these changes can occur simultaneously is totally ludicrous and you have disproven nothing. Let's see an article describing how this change occurred in detail. Can you find any? I doubt it because this is one of the things evolutionists never speak of.
989 posted on 12/23/2002 7:14 AM PST by gore3000
And where did you debunk the flagellum besides in your own mind?
As to the eye spot, your article only says that because it happened more than once then therefore the eye spot could have occurred. It is not a refutation of the complex mechanism required for an eye spot.
BTW - a blog from Don Lindsay is proof of absolutely nothing. The guy cannot even give references for his nonsense.
991 posted on 12/23/2002 7:28 AM PST by gore3000
1063 posted on 12/26/2002 5:40 PM PST by gore3000
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If I offended by saying spiritualist, I am sorry. Replace it with the "Those who are religious". But what is this about the Ten Commandments? What relevance does this have? Some (Commandments) are pretty good, some are essential in a society, a couple are meaningless (Who to worship, graven images, etc.). If a person goes through life following them, then fine... but so what? I have no problem with it. I follow most of them myself, simply because they are common sense...
I can make a rock have specificity and purpose. A sharp one can be used as a tool to crack open a nut or to kill an animal for food. Some natural, randomly created things have immense beauty, just as artwork. Mountains, grand canyon, are you saying that God designed the Grand Canyon? Probably so, so this gets us nowhere. But how do you refute the rock statement now?
Well the Ten Commandments is the basis of Judaism and Christianity so if you find no problem with someone following them it seems to me that the statement which I responded to that " Spiritualists not only deny their own earthly humanity, but also everything that is good in life here on earth in order to arrogantly proclaim they know more about invisible kingdoms." is just plain wrong.
The specificity of the rock was provided by yourself, by selecting amongst the many rocks one of the proper size for the purpose. As to art, art is more than beauty. There is design to art, there is no design to the Grand Canyon in the same sense. It did not arise to impress those looking at it. A painting is designed to convey a thought, a feeling, the Grand Canyon while it may awe those who look at it was not designed to provide the view but just to get water from one place to another.
1136 posted on 12/27/2002 6:42 PM PST by gore3000
Liberal LEFT lunatic fringe way out there!
I read your response. It had nothing to do with the question asked, and betrayed instead a fundamental misunderstanding of the question.
The claim by you and Behe that God made life is irrelevant. The important point is that both you and he reject naturalistic abiogenisis because of the impossibility of "amino acids randomly arranged themselves into DNA or RNA chains of some half a million bases long" in one fell swoop.
To restate donh's question: What evidence do you and Behe have that insists that life must have jumped from zero to fully formed cell in a single step?
You're making yourself very suspect in my eyes. Backtracking to your original argument about the universe being like a work of art and melding it to the above response, you are saying that the universe is designed to convey a thought or feeling and to impress those looking at it? This is what you're saying? Absurd. You see order in the universe, and so do I. But you take it to the extreme and say that there must be a designer. This is a irrational jump in reasoning. The universe HAS to be a certain way. It's this way. To immediately make a jump to creator is the easy thing to do, I admit, but I want proof. Hard evidence just like you demand from evolutionists. Show me the money, gore3000. Show me the evidence which you demand from me which makes your theory so obviously correct in your eyes.
You are trying to make me look like I am bashing religion. I made the that quoted statement above in response to this statement you made:
Materialists not only deny their own humanity but also everything that is good in life in order to arrogantly proclaim themselves free from a superior being.
AND I made the disclaimer that I am not attacking religion, I am simply taking the opposite viewpoint that you are taking to show the absurdity. YOU MADE the attack on materialism, but that doesn't matter. Only fundamentalist religious types have the right to be angry when they're theories are attacked. Isn't that right gore?
I was trying to be civil. I even apologized for saying "spiritualist" if it offended you. But you are obviously delusional. So now I must ask just one question...HOW OLD IS THE EARTH?
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