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."
I see. So abandoning the notion of a single common ancestor is just a minor glitch in the Darwinian agenda. Did you even bother to read what I wrote?
You are asking your opponents to prove a negative. You are asking for the impossible and thus claiming victory
Oh, you mean asking Behe if he even looked for possible alternative flagellum along a spectrum of normal genetic variation before making his preposterously undemonstratable claim of irreducible complexity? What a villain I am, to expect someone to put scientific effort into verifying a scientific thesis.
They also don't have much trouble saying it's a theory scientists accept with a very high degree of confidence--regardless of the perceptions of the average bottle-fed voter. And, therefore, deserves no more of a fuss made about it than does any other commonplace scientific theory we operate on. Any such extra-curricular fuss, in the politically charged halo surrounding public discussion of evolutionary theory, is baldly a political victory for creationists, not an objective bit of pedogogical hygiene.
It's not retrospective astonishment, it's science.
It's retrospective astonishment. There is no evidence for design that I am aware of that isn't just as easily accounted for as the evidence of differentiated physical processes seeking equalibrium. The existence of diamonds in nature, despite the enormous energy gradients they have to climb to reach this crystaline form, is just as good evidence of the necessity of design as any from the biological world. Populations of DNA-designed organisms seek equilibriums that optimally conserve resources for them in their given environment. That environments change is the only additional knowledge you need to know why apparent design occurs in the organic world.
Whereas, they can baldly assert that irreducible complexity PROVES ID and disproves darwinism? All I'm asking for is some demonstration of this whacky contention. Since my interlocutors have failed, for thread after thread, to produce a deductive proof of this contention, I've taken to asking for the inductive scientific demonstration.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but every time I looked at the scummy water in my yard under a microscope, I saw hundreds of different-looking and -behaving flagellum, so I am forced to wonder what universe this is, exactly, where flagellum can't possibly be capable of evolutionary change. If that's so--why aren't critters with flaggelum universally endowed with the exact same flagellum?
It makes one wonder if Behe and his followers ever actually owned a microscope. And it certainly does not endow me with confidence that any of them ever even made an attempt to critically evalute this thesis by looking for counterexamples in the neighborhood.
I think you are slightly overestimating my powers. I can hardly balance my checkbook, let alone single-handedly halt the work of the entire scientific community. As soon as someone publishes evidence of a designer I'll be the first one in line to read it.
Unsubstantiated claims of evolutionary bigotry are hardly evidence for a designer. What does your designer do that evolution can't?
I don't think I have said otherwise in this 800+ post thread.
And, therefore, deserves no more of a fuss made about it than does any other commonplace scientific theory we operate on.
This is only true if evolution already actually is identified as a "theory" in books with the same blase sobriety as other theories, such as the current favorite "plate tectonics" example, are. The problem (apparently) is that it is not identified as a "theory" at all, which (if true) I think you have effectively agreed is scientifically irresponsible.
After all, if it were identified as a theory in the text in question, this controversy would not (could not) even exist.
The people who "singled out" evolution are the authors who wrote a text and (apparently) neglected to point out its theory status (for some unknown reason). The disclaimer is merely a corrective measure to set things straight.
Any such extra- curricular fuss, in the politically charged halo surrounding public discussion of evolutionary theory, is baldly a political victory for creationists,
Maybe, but I don't care. People who care about this - including scientists - are not operating from any scientific considerations, but rather political ones. It's fine and dandy to say "I don't want creationists to have any political victories", but this is not a scientifically valid statement. It's a political one.
a political victory for creationists, not an objective bit of pedogogical [sic] hygiene.
You speak as if the two are mutually exclusive. I beg to differ. Putting a true statement in a book which (irresponsibly) neglects to identify "evolution" as a theory is, on the face of it, pedagogical hygiene. This is true even if Knuckle-Dragging Creationists want it to happen.
Appeals to Motive, Authority, and saying "the wrong people want this to happen!" are not scientific or objective statements, but rather, are little more than demonstrations of thinly-disguised bigotry.
For pete's sake: they are PUTTING A TRUE STATEMENT INTO A BOOK.
Exactly. This discussion is not going on in a vaccuum. It's beyond absurd to pretend that it is.
You sure know a lot about longshadow. Are you his groupie?
I guess it's his extensive experience wrestling with more worthy opponents than me which trained him so well to be able to restrain himself upon reading my first two horrible, taunting, rude Posts #475 (in which I calmly and patiently and humbly answered a reasonable question of his so as to clear up understandable confusion) and #495 (in which after pointing out his error I thanked him for "keeping me honest" when, after all, he had misinterpreted what I said) to him.
Yes, due to longshadow's heroic experience in "wrestling", he was able to restrain himself from flying off the handle until he read my Post #540 which, as you so accurately pointed out, "provoked [him] beyond the human capacity for restraint". Those three sentences of Post #540 (the third sentence in its entirety: "Which is too bad.") were just the last straw! Even longshadow, veteran that he is, was "provoked beyond the human capacity for restraint" by those amazingly provocative three sentences in Post #540.
Either that, or you're just more than a little bit delusional.
or
evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next.
-- Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology 5th ed. 1989 Worth Publishers, p.974
Darwin's definition of evolution: natural selection has gradually caused all lifeforms on Earth to have evolved from a single common ancestor.
Actually Darwin's definition was a bit more detailed than that, but this will do for our discussion.
Let's take the second one first and see why it is not a true definition of evolution. A change of frequency of alleles is definitely not evolution. Just switching around the genes in the gene pool does not create new genetic information. It is like shuffling a deck of cards does not get you any new cards. Evolution requires new genetic information so that description is a false description of evolution and coincidentally it is pretty much the description used in the phony TalkOrigins site.
The first one does a bit better. However it is also very cautious and does not say much. It just states that changes in genetic information passed on to succeeding generations are what evolution is about.However, the implication that the changes need to be towards greater complexity is there but is not made explicit.
The third one is wrong, I do not think Darwin ever used the word 'caused'. Here is his definition from the Origins:
"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse;. a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows."
From: Charles Darwin, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"
Whereas the three you posted just said that these changes 'happen', Darwin's original statement proposed that natural selection was the source of those changes. The newer versions do not. The reason of course is that selection cannot be the source of evolution since all selection does is destroy genetic information. I can see why evolutionists took it out of their descriptions of the theory but the problem is that they have not replaced it with any other explanation. So essentially at this point in time, evolution has been disproven. It has no explanation for how or why it occurs, so it can in no way be called a theory of anything anymore. That is why your fellow evolutionists never like to mention what the theory of evolution is. They know it is rhetoric and just plain nonsense.
No, the part I posted was the facts. The part I left out is just rhetoric and the opinion of someone who disregards the facts as he himself admits "the DNA evidence does not sway him". A scientist that willfully ignores the evidence is no scientist and his opinion is not worth anything.
Make man from stardust.
So are you Patrick Henry, or even a Henry?
You have it and have seen it on these threads - the intelligent design of the universe, the impossibility of abiogenesis, the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagella, the miracle of 100 trillion cells perfectly arising from a single one in a human being. Those are examples of creation. Now what clear scientific examples of transformations do you have?
The part you left out flatly contradicts your claim that the latest study has shut down the debate and closed the question.
Methinks evolution fails on both counts. On count #1 natural selection does not explain evolution because it destroys genetic information and evolution needs to explain how it is increased. As to #2 evolution predicted that traits 'melded', that was disproven. Evolution predicted that non-white races were inferior, that was disproven. Evolution predicted that DNA not in genes was junk, that was disproven. Evolution is constantly disproven by new biological discoveries, it is a totally phony and disproven theory all that is left is to bury it.
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.