Here is a better description of the experiment.
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 suppose you'll be upset if I don't accept any of these steps. Among other things, I believe there are new things under the sun, so to speak.
2. The idea we have of ourselves entails finitude and imperfection.
Well, someone who rejects 2, I would consider a megalomaniac, since that person would be rejecting finiteness and would consider themselves perfect. Consequently, I really doubt that you reject that particular step.
I suppose you'll be upset if I don't accept any of these steps.
Not at all. I didn't get upset with donh when he decided to reject Yockey or Doctor Stochastic when he dissed Roger Penrose or Nebullis when she didn't understand my words to mean the same as others on the thread did.
One of the great joys, or freedoms to be more precise, of being Christian is having His unconditional love. In a nutshell it means that nothing anyone can ever say or do would make me stop loving them. I accept differences and take no offense at unacceptabilities, except in that case I stand down to avoid harmful contention.
Provide proof.
You consider that a direct measurement? With which of your senses do you detect that light comes in individual quanta?
Funny, but it does not disprove the basic premise of the statement 'I think therefore I am' - that there is intelligence in the Universe and it has no materialistic basis.
Maybe not, but I don't need an inherently unpersuasive mega-bucket of high fallutin' 90 cent words to compose my proof, just a nose for the effulgent bouquet of my personal charm.
I most certainly did address, it, insults and all. You have made no point in any critically argumentative way, just aired a prejudice with which I adamantly do not agree. Some naturalists get pretty hot under the collar when some wretched little elf keeps popping up under their noses to insist that some notion they hold firmly is just a bit of nose-thumbing hypocricy, and that they are really athiests in agnostic's clothing. You have a pretty selective nose yourself, if you think I don't feel equally insulted here.
Perhaps you are confused. Setting the rules of a contest is not the same thing as setting the contemporary limits of science. If you offered a contest with a prize of a billion smackers for a plausable heliocentric scenario, of equal technical worth to the Ptolomaic system, before the time of the great sythesis: Brahe->Kepler->Copernicus->Newton, you could have had no serious takers, because no one would have the underpinnings to work from--not even for a billion bucks. That did not prevent certain greeks from formulating heliocentric models.
What's the difference?
Silly rabbit. Contests are for kids, not scientists, and they prove nothing, even if you insist they do three times while standing on your head and hold your breath until you turn blue.
Submit your proof below. Here, I'll provide a space.
...
This is a combination of begging the question, and ignoring the answer with a little rudeness thrown in for spice. A mushroom is I aver, quite obviously, a multi-ploidal organism in the making. Ploidy is simply a popular answer to the question, "How can I pass on the genes of a multitude of critters all at the same time. What we see in mushrooms is a sophisticated array of chemical signals that serve in a way analogous to the central clock of a computer, to align the reproductive timing of a number of organisms. It only looks hard if you've convinced yourself that the ploidy mechanism we have is the only one possible. This is obviously not so, as there are several different ploidy's currently deployed. Obviously, there was once a hefty competition in such things, and what we now see, and think of as fixed, and therefore, hard to explain, is simply the winners of the contest--the few remaining fossils, if you will pardon the conceit, of a previous competitive evolutionary paradigm.
Since you continue to get both the nomenclature and the point wrong, I will continue to attempt to correct you. Homology is a special word, when deployed by biologists. It specifically means relationships established by genetic determination. You have it exactly wrong--morphologies are what paleontologists can potentially get wrong--and they get it wrong, occassionally, in small details of the tree precisely because that's all they have to deal with--the morphology of bones. Since bone morphology changes can lag significantly behind genetic homological changes, that's to be expected. It does not discredit the enterprise that it occasionally makes mistakes and goes down blind alleys. So do the other natural sciences.
The Millikan experiment differentiated individual electrical charge on oil drops. No one saw the quanta--all they saw was oil drops. The rest of the story had to conjured by inductive reasoning, just as fossil stories about animals no one's actually ever petted are conjured by inductive reasoning.
Since you don't understand the science involved, your "refutation" of the mutational clock, in particular, is a hoot. You refute a position that science does not hold, with great fanfare. For the purposes of re-establishing the Tree of Life as Woese did in 2000, the molecular clock is a comparative sorting device, not an actual chronological device. You have wasted a ton of words refuting an irrelevant point.
Now this is one that we have not only discussed to death, but various people have repeatedly given you pointers back to that discussion a number of times. I will not continue this discussion for scratch yet again. Examine Woese's work until you have an inkling of understanding, and then you might be able to offer a relevant argument. This is nothing but another piece of canned hot air I've given you a chance to pull the top off of. I warned you to stop tooling me if you want me to play. You are very close to the limit of my patience at this point.
Most fungi are neither multi-cellular, nor unicellular. They are both, at various times. Some are actually mobile in their unicellular stages. They exist as unconnected, gene-exchanging unicellulars, until chemical signals draw them together to form the stalk. For most of them, most of their existence is unicellular.
As for the mind-body duality, I simply believe we don't know enough about matter to make assertions about its limitations. The 19th century billiard ball view of materialism certainly couldn't account for mind, but that's obsolete.
They are called eyeballs.
You cite the wrong experiment.
Millikan's Attempts to Disprove Einstein's TheoryIf we accept Einstein's theory, then, this is a completely different way to measure Planck's constant. The American experimental physicist Robert Millikan, who did not accept Einstein's theory, which he saw as an attack on the wave theory of light, worked for ten years, until 1916, on the photoelectric effect. He even devised techniques for scraping clean the metal surfaces inside the vacuum tube. For all his efforts he found disappointing results: he confirmed Einstein's theory, measuring Planck's constant to within 0.5% by this method. One consolation was that he did get a Nobel prize for this series of experiments. |
Other citations too numerous to use.
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.