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."
No it is not artificial, it means something. Matter of fact, lions and tigers are the same species they can interbreed.
Dingbat science in action. Can I quote you? Lions and tigers are the same species?
dispite your objections, speciation is an arbitrary line on a map drawn by humans. In the real world, there is only relative degrees of speciation. As ought to be painfully obvious to even the most casual observer.
Total balderdash. All you folk know how to say is that everyone says evolution is true.
I see. So all that evidence that PH correlates and VR pointlessly rubs in your face is actually just opinions. Fascinating. Apparently the unstated rule of evidence is that it has to pass muster with some incredibly strained laws of evidence known only to you and your Maker.
Science is based on evidence.
Science is, more importantly, based on the fierce forging of community opinion, mitigated by critical experiment, by the relevant scientists. The exact same data supports either the copernican, or the ptolomaic schools of astronomy. What scientists think is a crucial defining issue in science--it is an effort that moves forward by joint consensus.
Everythime I ask you folk to discuss the evidence you run away. Let's see the evidence, enough rhetorical nonsense.
Horse manure. Respond sensibly, or at all, to the reams of evidence that have been paraded past you over the years here. Every single evo thread reeks of evidence you have managed to ignore or treat illogically or fascitiously or by pocket veto, while ranting on an on about what miasmic mystics the evos are--as if persistent repetition could make a notion so self-serving and obviously off-the-wall true.
Wow, move over God, you've been replaced by... yeah those co-operative thingies. Probably won't be any Sunday services for those will there?
Oh, I don't know. If I'm right, all I've done is push the perplexity further back in time. Self-replicating, bodiless RNA communities is easy to say, hard to imagine. Harder still to imagine where they came from. Nothing about it suggests God couldn't be involved.
Oh just that and void the whole bible.
Yes it is and to use their age as an excuse for lying to them is totally despicable.
This take on the question would have no force in any other arena. You do not teach beginning calculus students about the inherent inductive feebleness of the theorem of the mean. You do not teach 3rd graders the exact chain of events involved in setting the engine timing. It would be a pointless exercise because they haven't the background to care or understand, yet. We will continue not to spend much time on the epistimological and ontological implications of science, in the 3rd grade science survey courses, for extremely good reasons. Is it patronizing? Sure it is, if attempted with compentent adults. Otherwise, it is just teachers trying to do something useful for a kid, rather than something pointless and dimwitted.
Nothing I have proposed voids the whole bible, unless you are a total fundamentalist. I have, in fact, said nothing the Catholic Church would object to, as per official papal documents.
"the designer will turn out to be"
Yes I'm a fundie and I can imagine quite a few RC's refuting what you have said with some document somewhere in the RC church.
In my opinion, the designer will turn out to be a hot community of co-operatively interacting RNA captured inside long-lasting sulfurize bubble clumps.
The above is as you say a guess. Science says otherwise. The impossibility of arranging the DNA bases totally at random says it is impossible. In addition is the chicken-egg problem that not only do you need that long string of DNA but you also need the cell itself and all that that entails in order to get a living reproducing organism. In addition to that we know so little as to chemosynthesis (which is what you are speaking about) that we are not even able to describe how it occurs. So again this is scientifically impossible. Of course, I am sure that such great scientists as Art Bell may disagree with me.
I already gave scientific proof of His existence in the post you just responded to. Since no doubt you did not bother to read it, here it is again:
Again, more rhetoric, no facts. I already have given scientific facts proving intelligent design:
1. the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum much discussed on this thread.
2. the Universe (post#823):
Imagine that you are a cosmic explorer who has just stumbled into the control room of the whole universe. There you discover an elaborate "universe-creating-machine", with rows and rows of dials, each with many possible settings. As you investigate, you learn that each dial represents some particular parameter that has to be calibrated with a precise value in order to create a universe in which life can exist. One dial represents the possible settings for the strong nuclear force, one for the gravitationl constant, one for Planck's constant, one for the ratio of the neutron mass to the proton mass, one for the strength of electromagnetic attraction, and so on. As you, the cosmic explorer, examine the dials, you find that they could easily have been tuned to different settings. Moreover, you determine by careful calculations that if any of the dial settings were even slightly altered, life would cease to exist. Yet for some reason each dial is set at just the exact value necessary to keep the universe running. What do you infer about the origin of these finely tuned dial settings?
From: Stephen C. Meyer, "Evidence for Design in Physics and Biology.
3. the impossibility of abiogenesis:
There is a tremendous amount of proof against abiogenesis. First of all is Pasteur's proof that life does not come from inert matter (and this was of course at one time the prediction of materialists). Then came the discovery of DNA and the chemical basis of organisms. This poses a totally insurmountable problem to abiogenesis. The smallest living cells has a DNA string of some one million base pairs long and some 600 genes, even cutting this number by a quarter as the smallest possible living cell would give us a string of some 250,000 base pairs of DNA. It is important to note here that DNA can be arranged in any of the four basic codes equally well, there is no chemical or other necessity to the sequence. The chances of such an arrangement arising are therefore 4^250,000. Now the number of atoms in the universe is said to be about 4^250. I would therefore call 4^250,000 an almost infinitely impossible chance (note that the supposition advanced that perhaps it was RNA that produced the first life has this same problem).
The problem though is even worse than that. Not only do you need two (2) strings of DNA perfectly matched to have life, but you also need a cell so that the DNA code can get the material to sustain that life. It is therefore a chicken and egg problem, you cannot have life without DNA (or RNA if one wants to be generous) but one also has to have the cell itself to provide the nutrients for the sustenance of the first life. Add to this problem that for the first life to have been the progenitor of all life on earth, it necessarily needs to have been pretty much the same as all life now on earth is, otherwise it could not have been the source of the life we know. Given all these considerations, yes, abiogenesis is impossible.
4. that the development of a human from conception to birth is a program:
Competence may reflect the expression of receptors specific for a given signaling molecule, the ability of the receptors to activate specific intracellular signaling pathways, or the presence of the transcription factors necessary to stimulate expression of the genes required to implement the developmental program induced.
From: Cell Interactions in Development
Colleagues in sliming opponents that is!
Behe proved it. He gave incontrovertible scientific proof for irreducible complexity. No one has been able to refute it in the 6 years or so it has been out there. Further, as I have said, Darwin himself made the challenge, Behe met it. Evolution is dead.
First you evolutionists say that evolution is science and when confronted with the facts against it then you say that science is garbage. Therefore it must be a true syllogism that evolution is garbage.
You are changing the subject, nevertheless I shall humor you. Punctuated equilibrium is total nonsense. Here's why - not only does it say that all the features, functions, genes, and non-coding DNA reqired for a transformation occurred together all of a sudden, but it says that a whole group of organisms made the same miraculous transformation all at once. Darwin was not a scientist, but he did realize that such a notion is totally absurd that's why he rejected it and why anyone with an ounce of common sense will also reject 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.