'55 Science Paper Retracted to Thwart Creationists 858
i_like_spam writes "The New York Times has up a story about a paper published in 1955 by Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College. The paper, entitled 'Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life', speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in the Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, 'one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.' Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, but today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want — from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention. So after 52 years, he has retracted the paper. 'Dr. Jacobson's retraction is in "the noblest tradition of science," Rosalind Reid, editor of American Scientist, wrote in its November-December issue, which has Dr. Jacobson's letter. His letter shows, Ms. Reid wrote, "the distinction between a scientist who cannot let error stand, no matter the embarrassment of public correction," and people who "cling to dogma."'"
Celebration/Mourning (Score:5, Insightful)
This noble effort is also to be mourned because of the manipulation and steering of science to fill political goals driven by lack of scientific understanding in the wider community.
Likely result (Score:5, Insightful)
The amount of confirmation bias that people can exhibit when their passions are challenged is incredible.
Re:Likely result (Score:5, Funny)
I can think of about 25% of the U.S. population who prove your statement incontrovertibly true.
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"Because it's my position, and I'm unbiased."
Chris Mattern
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Re:Likely result (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Likely result (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah. The difference is between the people who are aware of their biases - namely, me and everyone who agrees with me - and people who are sadly deluded and too caught up in the web of deceit or just plain too stupid to realize it or too stubborn to admit it, or who actually purposefully and maliciously lying and/or engaged in a huge conspiracy against the truth for whatever reason.
If you or the moderators disagree, that's just because your bias of thinking yourself as objective. Let go of your bias and support the objective point of view by modding me up ;).
The thing is, we humans don't actually perceive reality, we perceive an approximation of it, produced by our senses and mental faculties. It is impossible to know how closely your approximation actually resembles reality as a whole or at any particular point, because you have no way of comparing it to reality proper, because the latter is not perceptible to you. That's why people usually assume that their approximation is a good match and anyone who disagrees is wrong or biased. And this is assuming that a particular perception is actually based on some objective reality, which is not at all certain for things like moral values.
What this means is that no one is truly aware of their own biases, since that awareness could only be gained by comparing your approximation of reality to reality proper, which is impossible. You, gentle reader, are biased, and not aware of all of your biases, no matter how certain you are of your own objectivity. You can trust me on this, because I clearly am truly objective, being aware of all this :).
Re:MATH not MATHS (Score:4, Informative)
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If this is incorrect, I retract the above statement before it is misused in a 'my English is better than yours' debate. In the interests of good science of course...
Re:Likely result (Score:4, Funny)
Are you talking about the "humans caused global warming" crowd?
Ironic curiosity (Score:5, Interesting)
Where is your own opinion here coming from? Do you have the knowledge & understanding of the facts of the situation to know that such a slant would be wrong? Or does it just fit your own nice package of preconceived notions?
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:5, Insightful)
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That is not true. You are thinking of Math.
Science merely requires a sufficiently small amount of contradictory evidence before belief. Science is ALWAYS WRONG, and is ALWAYS in the pursuit of replacing theories which are OBVIOUSLY WRONG with theories that are more SUBTLY wrong.
If Science were ever RIGHT on a particular subject, there would be no more need to perform science on it. But we always find that no matter how closely a scientific theory matches reality, the
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:4, Informative)
First, notice the way you had to qualify your definition, i.e. "belief without proof". You recognize that the word "belief", anyway, just indicates that you accept something to be true. It doesn't say anything about the justification for your belief, only that you have the belief. Well, in our translations of the Bible, "believe" and "faith" are both used to translate the same root word, in verb or noun form (pistis, pistia, etc.).
The actual meaning of "faith" is complex. It has more than one sense, both in the Biblical languages [bible.org] and in English [webster.com]. It can mean fidelity, loyalty, faithfulness. "I made the promise in good faith." "He has been a faithful companion." It can mean conviction of the truth of something. It can mean trust in something, or reliance on it. There's an interesting verse in Paul's letter to the Roman church, with three different uses: disbelieve, unbelief, and faithfulness--where the third use is referring to God's own "faith". That's right, God is said to have faith--and in that case it obviously has nothing to do with a blind leap. (Here's [bible.org] the verse, if you're curious, along with the language resources.)
An illustration. Most people will say that Christian faith is more than simple intellectual assent; it involves a trust component. Trust? Aren't I talking about blind faith now? No, not necessarily. As I said above, there's a sense of trusting in something, relying on it. I would compare it to trusting in the skill of a pilot and the construction of an airplane to take you safely where you're going. Your trust might be blind--perhaps if you're from an isolated tribal culture with no familiarity with modern technology. Or it might be extremely well-founded, based on a familiarity with the engineering of the manufacturer and the maintenance procedures of the airline and the training & experience of the pilot. Or it might be slightly less researched--maybe you just know that the airline has a good track-record, and so you just trust in all the rest. In other words, your faith can have different levels of warrant. And the more research you've done, the stronger your faith will be.
And that is precisely how I view Christian faith--made stronger by better evidence. I trust in the promises of God and the work of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. I judge them to be trustworthy, and I judge myself to have good enough reason to exercise that trust.
If you want to read a defense of the idea that the Bible does not ask for a blind leap, but trust in a reliable source, you can check out this essay [str.org] by Greg Koukl. (He makes a good positive case, though it's not exhaustive.)
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:5, Informative)
You missed a better one. The first verse of Hebrews 11 [gnpcb.org] would make a stronger case: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
I pointed you to an essay for a "positive" Biblical case for my view. That is, it points out that knowledge based on good evidence is a major theme in the Gospels and letters of the New Testament. I also said it wasn't exhaustive. I meant that it doesn't deal with criticisms. Specifically, I had in mind that it doesn't address Hebrews 11:1 and Jesus' words to Thomas. I don't think it's at all hard to see why they do not contradict my view, but that essay didn't go through those issues.
Here's the problem: Did you actually read John 20:29? What does it say? That Thomas saw, and believed. Thomas believed. Notice that. He believed. Look at it again. Did Jesus say that his faith wasn't real faith because he wanted justification? No! Did he criticize Thomas? Well...Maybe. Not directly. He praised others who had been willing to believe without seeing him directly. That's either indirect criticism of Thomas' skepticism (as people usually assume), or it's praise for people willing to believe without the level of proof Thomas had. But neither means that faith must be blind.
Jesus' point may have been that it will be harder for people to believe who don't get to see the resurrected body, so they deserve praise. But if he was criticizing Thomas, I'd say it was because his skepticism was not reasonable. It bordered on paranoia. John 20:29 doesn't happen in a vacuum, and it wasn't addressed to you. It was addressed to Thomas, after 20 chapters of Jesus demonstrating divine power, walking on water, raising a dead man, then predicting his own death and resurrection. (I don't care if you don't believe it happened. We're talking about the meaning of the events and the claims. We're defining the Biblical worldview, not talking about whether it's true. You're free to disbelieve, but you're not free to redefine what they said and meant.) After what Thomas had seen, his insistence to see and feel Jesus' hands and side was not reasoned caution, it was a bitter spirit of forgetfulness and disbelief.
As I said, Hebrews 11:1 is stronger--if you read it as a sentence in a vacuum. But keep reading the rest of the chapter. It's often called the "faith hall of fame"--it lists a bunch of Old Testament people who showed great faith. And in many (most?) of those examples, the faith for which they are being praised was exhibited after they had spoken directly with God or seen demonstrations of divine power. Their belief was warranted, and the fact that they had seen proof of God did not make "faith" an empty thing. If you read 11:13, it's more clear. "These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar". They had faith that God would deliver on his promises, even though they died before seeing those promises fulfilled. That's the context. The context does not bear out the idea that 11:1 means faith is only faith if it's blind.
On the basis of these observations, I'm rather confident that the Bible does not ask for blind faith. You may not believe that the evidence is good, but that doesn't mean the Bible is asking for belief without warrant.
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:5, Informative)
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One question I don't have an answer for is, how can scientists reliably speculate the state of this earth millions or billions of years ago with the evidence we have now, in this day and age? I can't see how that is feasibly possible, without basing it around assumptions or belief.
They make a few basic assumptions ("the rate of carbon-14 decay is constant", "the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere is constant over the time-span considered") which are supported by our current knowledge of the world around us. They then state that, if these are correct and there are no other mechanisms at work, then fossils found can have their age determined by comparing the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12.
The thing that people with religious mindsets seem to find difficult to underst
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm really not looking to debate theology, but I'd like to note:
(1) That is obviously circular. If the the Bible is not God-Breathed OR not flawlessly-scribed OR not flawlessly-translated, then it's circular reference to itself obviously doesn't change anything.
(2) The majority of Christians do not see a conflict between evolution and the Bible.
More proof is in nature, in the complexity and creativness of it
Evolution is a proven engine of complexity and creativity. In fact I have done experiments myself and directly witnessed and proven that fact.
I am astounded at the people who presume to tell God how He is and is not allowed to run His universe. We have an amazing universe with awe inspiring laws of physics, and I am baffled at how some people can accept God making perfect and complete mechanisms to run His universe - nuclear fusion to power the sun and provide us light - the spinning earth orbiting the sun to divide day from night and create th3 seasons - the laws of chemistry to provide us food and create DNA and run all of our biochemical processes - yet they insist on telling God that He is FORBIDDEN to have chosen to use evolution to create the diversity of life on earth.
God can use optics as his chosen mechanism to create rainbows, but God cannot use evolution as his chosen mechanism to create His diversity of life?
I don't understand that.
One question I don't have an answer for is, how can scientists reliably speculate the state of this earth millions or billions of years ago with the evidence we have now, in this day and age?
For a moment, imagine a deceiving God. A God planting false evidence to mislead us.
If that were true, you couldn't know or trust anything. You could be a brain in a jar. Everything you see and hear could be a complete fiction. In fact all of your memories could be planted deceptions. The entire universe could have been created three days ago, and everything you think you know and believe could be an elaborate deliberate deception.
*If* one accepts the premise of a deliberately deceiving God, one cannot know or believe anything. Communication itself becomes meaningless. All rational thought and communication is null and void.
The first assumption for rational thought and rational communication MUST be to reject the notion that we are being deliberately deceived by a malicious lying God. If God wants to deceive us with by planting misleading evidence, then We Shall Be Misled.
Some people try to assert that the earth is around 6,000 years old. They assert that the Grand Canyon was quickly carved by a torrent of water after Noah's Flood. You don't need to be any sort of expert to see that is wrong. A huge fast gush of water over a short timespan will carve earth in a straight line. A small slow flow of water over millions of years will carve earth in a meandering snaking path. Aerial photos of the Grand Canyon show not only a winding path, it shows several sharp U-turns. Sharp U-turns that a short fast gush of water would instantly cut straight through. Geologists are not stupid. There are a THOUSAND things that demonstrate the Grand Canyon is millions of years old, my example is simply an obvious point that anyone and everyong can see is obviously true without a geology PhD.
There are only two possibilities. Either the Grand Canyon (and the Earth) really is extremely old, or God went to quite a bit of effort to plant a lot of evidence designed to deceive us into believing it is old. I reject the notion of a lying deceiving God, but in any case if God wants to deceive us then We Shall Be Deceived.
Forensic scientists can establish Beyond-Any-Reasonable-Doubt what happened at a crime scene, even if there was no witness. Scientists can determine a great many things about the past Beyond-Any-Reasonable-Doubt, even if there was no one there to witness it.
There is a chuck of the fossil
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't go to my car dealer and stare him down while uttering, "This vehicle...it bleeds. Lo be those that do so. Fix thusly. Cheese wagon, rolling softly down the goat mouse."
But to be fair, most of the paraphrasing in religion stems from the fact that many people are trying to live based on an instruction manual written over a millennium ago in a different language. Sort of like using the Japanese booklet for an Atari2600 to learn how to configure your American DVR to record your favorite shows.
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That's easy. A visible, measured, violation of the laws of science.
In short. A miracle.
Nephilium
Re:Ironic curiosity (Score:4, Insightful)
That's easy. A visible, measured, violation of the laws of science.
In short. A miracle.
Nephilium
People retract stuff all the time... so what! (Score:3, Interesting)
In the 1960s, tectonic plate theory was poo-pooed as being bulshit. The PhDs of the day would ridicule tectonics and instead forwrd their own highly implausable theories. These same learned people later withdrew their claims as anti-tectonic claims became unsustainable..
Folks, science advances and so does knowledge. Material, particularly that based on opinion
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This ought to be good. What religious beliefs did Einstein have?
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Re:Einstein and God (Score:4, Informative)
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Of all the purviews into his personal life, it is the fact that HE HATED the rumors that he was a religious man that got the most attention.
You're only making the problem worse.
He was an atheist, get it through your thick skull.
Re:People retract stuff all the time... so what! (Score:5, Interesting)
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But isn't that exactly what has happened?
And, if it isn't "correct", then what else has scientists written that isn't "correct" yet still remains because it DOES support the current dogma (eg Global Warming/Cooling)?
The point I'm making isn't pro-creationist/anti science or pro-science/anti creationist but rather trying to make the case that conclusions of science can be wrong, and yet still be accepted by scientists, who are blinded by current
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Also, if your ideas that are incorrect were coopted by a bunch of insane pricks, wouldn't you want to set the record straight?
Re:Likely result (Score:5, Insightful)
You should withdraw this post because it is wrong.
He re-read the paper because of the quotes by creationists. It was re-reading the paper that revealed the errors in the paper. It was the errors is the paper that caused him to withdraw it.
Do you get it? He withdrew the paper because it was wrong. Creationists drove him to discover that it was wrong, but their quotes are not WHY it was withdrawn.
I don't have a problem with the scientific method. However Evolution isn't PART of the scientific method, because it hasn't predicted ANYTHING.
Of course it has. Experiments done on flies and bacteria have borne out the predictions of evolution, and frequently we discover fossils belonging to an intermediary species predicted by evolution. Hell, DNA itself was predicted by evolutionary theory, in particular a biological method of passing traits from parent to offspring that does NOT include traits acquired during life.
When scientists can create life from inert matter, I'll agree that evolution conforms to the scientific method
Evolution does not attempt to explain the origins of life, it only explains the diversification of life. Stop acting like you respect the scientific method when you can't even apply it.
Re:Likely result (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Likely result (Score:5, Insightful)
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You propose that the poster you quoted is never wrong. We'll take this statement as Truth B. Truth A similarly states that it is I who am never wrong.
Truth A and Truth B, under normal conditions, can coexist. However, if you run this pair through enough permutations, you will eventually include an instance that pits myself against him. In such a case, the two statements are mutually exclusive.
Since A is a constant, and B is hyp
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It gets retracted when either an error is discovered in it, or new evidence is discovered which contradicts it.
This is the way science works. It is based on evidence, not beliefs.
Re:Likely result (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like you already did.
'Changing your mind' from your first post is usually alluding to things like 'I think I'll have the spaghetti instead of the salad'. It's something anyone can do on a whim.
He discovered a factual error in a work he had done, which leads to different conclusions. That's an entirely different thing.
The guy wrote something that he believed in '55 but doesn't believe today.
He knows there is now evidence showing what he thought in '55 was incorrect. He bases his understanding on the accumulated evidence of science, which has extended quite a bit since '55.
The beliefs of established science evolve. And they are beliefs.
Unlike religion, scientific believes can change when new evidence shows old ones were wrong. Religion doesn't change no matter how much evidence there is showing it's wrong.
Fact's don't change with time.
No, but new facts are constantly being discovered which extend and refine our knowledge of the universe. We cannot have final 'beliefs' on how everything in the universe works because we are still learning about it. But in each pass we get closer and closer to fundamental truths. Religion stays where it's always been.
Re:Likely result (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Likely result (Score:4, Insightful)
Six times in full, solo (though I will confess to skimming the "Begats" and the Psalms.
Twice in full in day by day study with a study group (No skimming).
Dozens of times piecemeal in search of specific items.
Christianity which is not based on traditions, but rather on faith in the Word of God which has withstood thousands of years of oppression
Exactly the same as every other religion and their infallible texts which have been miraculously supplied and preserved. It's nonsense to claim a special place for christianity. It's not any different.
There's nothing wrong with (your branch of) Christianity being a religion. That one is a pointless battle. You're fighting against the very definition of religion. Your claim though that christianity is not tradition based is a nonsense. The traditions are mostly documented in the bible you clutch, and others are disguised as being "an understanding of the true meaning" of the same.
As you said, you've located two of the items for yourself. You have however, started cherry-picking already. You claimed that all scripture is God-Breathed. Make up your mind.
But all other winged creatures that have four legs you are to detest
here's a hint. There are none! The bibles writers believed that insects had four legs. Are you telling me you trust the Divine Inspiration through a process that can't even transmit a single digit number without error?
And no, pi does not, in effect, equal 3. That you would even suggest so indicates a lack of critical thought on your part that borders on the unforgivable in a forum specifically aimed for nerds and geeks.
Night, Day and Plants pre-sun... Perhaps you should actually go and read Genesis yourself? It's the very 1st chapter and already the books credibility (and yours for all your claims of knowing it better than me) is falling apart.
1st : Night and Day.
3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4: And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5: And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
2nd:Plants
11: And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12: And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
3rd:Sun and moon
14: And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16: And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17: And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18: And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19: And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
Regarding Pi:
I Kings 7
23: And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about.
2 Chronicles 4
2: Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.
God can't do math. Delightful.
See now, I'm sorry so many years of your life have been wasted indoctrinating yourself (or being indoctrinated) into a false belief, but living an entire life in this level of denial would be even worse. Open your eyes. The bible is no
Re:Likely result (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? So the earth is still flat and the sun revolves around it? and matter is seamless?
Get a grip. What we humans call "facts" are our closest approximation of the truth we have now. Once you realize that, facts do indeed change with time. That's the beauty and the problem with science; it's not dogma but a collection of evidence over time accumulated so that current and future generations can make better and better attempts to understand nature. As we accumulate more evidence our understanding changes and things we may have believed to be fact in the past are known to be incorrect now (or things we believe to be fact now may not be considered fact in the future).
Religion's failure has always been a resistance to change and the truth because those in power only remain in power if they have all the keys.
Re:Likely result (Score:5, Insightful)
Papers are retracted when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary of their conclusions... most of the time that happens when new facts emerge as the science progresses.
<blockquote>This is more a blow (in the long term) to the idea that science yields objective truth, IMO.</blockquote>
I think the bigger concern is that you look for "objective truth"(tm)... There is no such thing - there is only "best approximation" based on the evidence thus far obtained. Science and the scientific method just happen to provide the best framework for making reasonable judgments about the real world, based on theories, the only measure of the success of which, is their PREDICTIVE CAPACITY.
If you come up with a better system, let me know. Until then, I'll be happy with an idea, rather than a belief-based "objective truth", thank you.
Re:Likely result (Score:4, Informative)
If you're in science, it's basically your opinion that scientific theories are only useful if they're predictive. If you don't buy that, you're not in science.
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This is more a blow (in the long term) to the idea that science yields objective truth, IMO.
That's because, in a way, it doesn't. Science only yields the current truth, tomorrow everything we believe could be wrong. As the TFA says:
"The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith."
I believe that this a good thing, a lot of people dislike uncertainty, however.
Re:Likely result (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, another favorite tactic of the pseudo-scientific con-artists. "I can't say why he's doing it, but here's why he's doing it..."
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Dogma implies that people of faith are following something merely because it is pushed by a church and hammered into their skulls, not that people are capable of independent thought and coming to their own conclusions. As a person who does believe in some faith, I seem to be in a small minority (maybe a less vocal group) on Slashdot, but all of
Re:Celebration/Mourning (Score:5, Insightful)
I am unaware of any scientist who is celebrating this as a thwart to "those who cling to dogma". What we are celebrating is the willingness of a scientist to retract his own work when it failed to be held up to scientific investigation and contained errors. The willingness of the classically trained scientist to search for veracity and be enthusiastic enough to put their work up for criticism by ones colleagues while also be willing to retract work that cannot be held as scientific fact is what is to be celebrated.
Re:Celebration/Mourning (Score:5, Informative)
Scientists believe knowledge comes from evidence and the logical conclusions derivable from that evidence.
Religious people believe knowledge comes from "faith" (aka "it is written"), which is the polar opposite of evidence.
The so called "moderate" religious people exist in a state of mind called "cognitive dissonance" whereby all knowledge is derived from evidence and logic EXCEPT knowledge pertaining to topics they have been indoctrinated from birth to accept due to faith. This is your textbook dogma.
Don't take a textbook definition of dogma and call it anything else. That's really disingenuous of you.
Re:Celebration/Mourning (Score:4, Insightful)
As for cognitive dissonance: I consider myself a "moderately" religious person. I do not blindly believe in Genesis. However, when I see how violence propogates itself through generations in the middle east and elsewhere, I cannot believe that idea of original sin does not resonate with some Truth. Certainly Adam and Eve were not real, but a quantum mechanical wavefunction may not be real either.
My life is filled with actions and belief not based on evidence or logic though. For example, I could probably fill pages with the strange rituals I use to beg microsoft software products to not crash. No, I think cognitive dissonance is believing that throughout history all human behavior has been dominated by irrational beliefs, except for 21st century atheists.
Just my 2 cents.
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If you think faith is about fairy tales about an afterlife, you've been talking to the wrong people. I suppose, to me, the important part is that you are happy and centered with yourself. For me, that involves being a Christian; for you, it's apparently being a rationalist.
I suspect your problem is with people
Re:Celebration/Mourning (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely it's falsifiable.
One way to falsify it would be to show evidence that there was life on the earth before then.
Another way would be to discover life elsewhere, on some other planet, and demonstrate that it has a common ancestor in the evolutionary chain as ourselves. This would not immediately disprove Earth as the origin, but it would indicate that it is not necessarily the origin of all life.
Another way to falsify the statement would be to demonstrate that despite extensive search there has been no evidence of life found in three billion year old strata (I have no idea if we actually have access to any, outside the moon). This would indicate life arose more recently.
There are all sorts of ideas about how abiogenesis may have come about, and a number of people are researching, coming up with theories and hypotheses, and, most importantly of all, ideas on how they can be investigated.
Of course, there is no generally accepted theory of abiogenesis yet, the way there is of gravity, electro-magnetism, and evolution by natural selection. But they're working on it.
Which is more than can be said of any Creationist. In all the years they've been around, they've yet to suggest a single experiment, or come forth with any single thing their "theory" would predict. All they can do is dig up gaps in our current understanding of evolutionary processes and claim they are "proof" of whatever they want to propose.
Re:Celebration/Mourning (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. Go three billion light years away with a really strong telescope. Tell me what you see.
Re:reversing the burden of proof (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Celebration/Mourning (Score:4, Informative)
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Futile Effort (Score:5, Insightful)
But in all serious, this is going to be a pretty futile effort. It's greatly appreciated but it's probably going to backfire. This could be spun as 'lawyers' forcing a scientist's views out of sight, a scientist that's just trying to tell the truth. The same lawyers that have orchestrated the dinosaur bones found across the world.
And the character assassination from the Creationists will most likely consist of 'waffler' and 'flip-flopper', two terms I have no idea why they even exist.
This is the sign of a man of the highest quality in my eyes. I only wish that everyone--especially the politicians--look to him for guidance in how to 1) take ownership of something when you're wrong and 2) fix it.
i'm confused on the timeline (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, so is the earth billions of years old, or 6000 years old, as told in the bible?
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A couple of theologians named Ussher and Lightfoot (not Gordon) ran the numbers between Adam and a known historical event (the Babylonian exile), using all the "This dipshit begat that dipshit" lines and arrived at an approximation of 6000 years (October 23, 4004 B.C. to be exact). A similar timeline had been roughly accepted long before either theologian, but they "locked it down."
If you read Genesis, the first couple of chapters, you come to a surprising conclusion. It talks about God creating light, but not water or dirt. In fact, "It was without form, and void. [bible.com]" The linked passage (linked references, how novel!) mentions the existence of water before light is even created. So it would be more correct to say that earth existed, but was dead? A planet without a star? I don't know, but it doesn't sound like He started from scratch (or pure energy).
So it's more correct to say t
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The only way to make your statement "work" is to stubbornly fail to acknowledge any other possible meaning of "day" (of the "seven") in a highly-allegorical book.
I held my comment the last 20 times this exact same lame joke was modded +5 Funny, but this time I'll comment.
Re:i'm confused on the timeline (Score:5, Funny)
Re:i'm confused on the timeline (Score:4, Informative)
This site [answersingenesis.org] should provide you with the answer to your question. In particular, this document [answersingenesis.org] lays out the argument quite nicely.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess what he meant to say was
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Re:i'm confused on the timeline (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the top ranked page for me:
http://www.albatrus.org/english/theology/creation/biblical_age_earth.htm [albatrus.org]
which uses the following passages for reference:
It seems like most of the dates are not explicitly mentioned, but they can be grafted onto a skeleton of known historical events (such as the fall of Jerusalem)
[I haven't actually checked these out myself....]
Re:i'm confused on the timeline (Score:5, Insightful)
Last time I checked, popular belief didn't make things true. A majority of the population of the world used to think the sun revolved around the earth. It was this "scientific minority" you speak of that happened to be right. This was not an isolated incident, either; it has happened fairly regularly throughout history.
Listen, pal, if you don't trust scientists, then give up all your modern conveniences and move into a cave. You should be respectful of the work they've done to provide you with what you have.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahem, I likely am a rare commodity here, as a Kemetic Orthodox, and from my faiths perspective, your "far older" book is but a pup, a blimp on the radar of time. Pieces of our holy works have been found that pre-date Abraham, before Babylon, before the stated beginning of the world in your documentation. Your faith borrowed from ours, one of your key figures was even raised, and trained, by ours. You have no concept of time.
Incidentally, scientif
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No, if you hold that the tale of Genesis is literally true, you get a contradiction, because there are two creation stories in Genesis that are contradictory if taken literally.
Fantastic! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:5, Funny)
Why did he do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If he retracted it just because creationists quoted it, that's an example of the same dogma religious zealots are critisized for.
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"Things grew worse when he reread his paper, he said, because he discovered errors. [...] Another assertion in the paper, about what would have had to occur simultaneously for living matter to arise, is just plain wrong, he said, adding, "It was a dumb mistake, but nobody ever caught me on it.""
Re:Why did he do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you RTFA, it says that he was reminded of the paper because the creationists quoted it. Because it was brought to his attention again he re-read it. He discovered it contained embarrassing factual errors, so he retracted it. It's too bad that he only caught the errors after they had been misused, but it's great that he caught the errors eventually and responded appropriately.
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It's pretty likely that his research being cited to help prove something he didn't believe was enough to get him to look it over more closely. If his research had been used to prove something he believed to be true, he probably wouldn't have examined it as closely. You really can't take the motivation out of science, but as long as the science is sound, it doesn't really matter.
As for whether re-reading something years later would show any errors to be obivious, I would hope so. If the field has adva
When will creationist realize? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:When will creationist realize? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no debate in the scientific community about whether evolution produced all life or not. There's a cultural and political debate, which scientists have been dragged into. Whatever you make of your opinions and claims, don't pretend for one moment that science is on your side.
that is precisely the problem with creationists (Score:3, Insightful)
'one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.'
thats all it takes. and yes, given enough time, they could turn into some sexually-reproductive organism, which, to use my earlier example, would be like getting monthly compounding
i frankly see no reason for this retraction. there is no 'ammunition' here in any sense.
The really pathetic part of this... (Score:5, Interesting)
i would like to make a retraction (Score:5, Funny)
thank you for your attention
Because of "creationists"... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is his paper right, or wrong? If he's claiming the first and retracting it, science is harmed, not furthered. If it's wrong, retraction should happen anyway.
This is really irrational. I understand the motivation to find any position of anyone on the planet that decries "creationism" and post it, but do you really want to overtly demonstrate your complete dependence on it in that way, while committing some really obvious non-sequiturs along the way?
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Original retraction letter (Score:5, Informative)
How Times have Changed (Score:3, Insightful)
What seems to have happened is that some creationists decided to make evolution their litmus test. They decided to make it a big controvery. They decided to tell people that "omfg we have to oppose this with every fiber of our being" and I really haven't a clue why they did that (other than being stupid).
This has happened before. There used to be people who believed in geocentrism for the exact same reason taht people reject evolution - because they just honestly WANT to believe the bible. But here's the deal, even creationist don't believe in geocentrism, yet creationist still believe the bible. So what happened? They just changed their interpretation of it. I can't figure out why they don't just do that again.
Re:How Times have Changed (Score:4, Interesting)
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What seems to have happened is that some creationists decided to make evolution their litmus test. They decided to make it a big controvery. They decided to tell people that "omfg we have to oppose this with every fiber of our being" and I really haven't a clue why they did that (other than being stupid).
If I understand t
Science vs. Faith (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Overeactions 'R Us (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Overeactions 'R Us (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Creationism vs Science (Score:4, Interesting)
Alice: "One CAN'T believe impossible things."
White Queen: "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for a half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
So, on the one hand, a Creationist will happily accept radioactive decay and the notion that radioactive isotopes have half-lives, and even understand what that basically means, but then turn around and reject that as evidence for an old Earth. There objections to radioactive decay in particular fall into three basic camps:
1. Radioactive decay happened faster in the past - This, of course, is ludicrous, and it should be pointed out to them that tinkering with decay rights to make isotopes decay faster would release so much energy that they would basically melt the planet.
2. Radioactive isotopes were created at various states of decay - This is the omphalism argument (related to the famous Light Was Created In Transit argument). There's no way to falsify that, which pretty much defeats at as a empirically meaningful statement (translation: even if it's true, science would have to ignore it as a possibility).
3. You Weren't There So How Would You Know - This is actually a pretty common claim by Young Earth Creationists, though, as it relates to the White Queen Hypothesis, it's difficult to say how invoking epistemological nihilism helps there own claims any better than a scientific one. Generally, they aren't sufficiently aware of the logical trap involved in invoking it.
Re:The article stereotypes faith (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree that blanket statements are often stupid, sometimes they are correct. In this case, your experiences seem to fly in the face of everyone else's.
No, science is not based on axioms — you're thinking of mathematics, which is not the same thing. Science is not based on deductive logic like math is — quite the opposite, in fact. Science is based on inductive logic, which works in the opposite direction: the scientist observes the world around him and tries to elucidate its underlying structure from those observations. So in a sense, the scientist does not know what the axioms are; he is trying to discover them.
Ignoring for a moment your misuse of the term "axiom": I will concede that a scientist who has developed his own theories and who accepts them may find it difficult or painful to accept that they are wrong. However, science as a discipline is founded on the notion that models and theories must be tested, and one scientist (or a group of scientists) stubbornly refusing to accept that their models are incorrect does not materially effect science as a whole, especially in the long term. Religion is not at all the same in this regard; many people continue to reject observable phenomena because they contradict their faith.
I should warn you; I am a mathematician. What are Euler's axioms?
Leaving that aside for now, it seems from your comment that you are profoundly confused about the differences between science and mathematics, the latter being properly thought of as a branch of philosophy, and not science at all. Math does not concern itself with what is true in a physical sense; from a mathematical perspective, whether the world is flat or round is of no importance whatsoever. Math is a logical excursion, and at a core level axioms are totally arbitrary. It's a game of logic, and we deduce what we can from a few axioms that we essentially make up. Now, it is true that it is not possible to prove that a sufficiently complex set of axioms is self-consistent; you might say that we take this as a matter of faith. But it isn't faith that is anything like religious faith: it's more like having faith that the Sudoku puzzle you're wrestling with has a solution even if you lack the mathematical ability to prove that it really does.
Math cannot, by its nature, be in conflict with religion. It does not attempt, by itself, to predict or characterize anything in the natural world. That scientists find it a useful tool is a happy coincidence (or unhappy, depending on your belief system).
Re:The article stereotypes faith (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspected as much. Interesting, though, that you should pick Euclid as an example: one of his axioms, the parallel postulate, was "overturned" as nearly as one can do such a thing in mathematics: it was found to be independent of the others he advanced. This did not make Euclidean geometry invalid, however, which is very important: Euclidean geometry continues to be studied and is not "wrong" because in a mathematical context, the only way something can be wrong is for it to be logically inconsistent. The discovery that an axiomatic system consisting of Euclid's other axioms plus the logical negation of the parallel postulate itself constitutes a consistent geometry — hyperbolic geometry — resulted in an immense amount of mathematical development, however.
But understand: Euclidean geometry remains just as valid today as it did when Euclid wrote the Elements. It has been refined and placed on more rigorous footing, but none of it was wrong. In fact, it has been shown that hyperbolic geometry is consistent if and only if Euclidean geometry is consistent — one cannot be right and the other wrong. They are either both right, or both wrong.
At the time that mathematicians began studying hyperbolic geometry, there were a lot of hysterical raisins that made a lot of fuss about which was "real". Note, however, that these people were talking about which system better models the real world, and were at their core making physical arguments, not mathematical ones. The same sorts of criticisms were leveled at negative numbers, complex numbers, spaces with dimensions greater than 3, etc. They are always non-mathematical criticisms based on the idea that things that do not have an obvious counterpart in the real world should not be studied. Thankfully, mathematicians have always told these people to sod off.
This is true. At some level, we must take it on faith that we exist and that we can interact with the natural world. But really, if we don't, who cares? Unlike the religion vs. science argument, there aren't really two sides to this.
Yes, it does — sort of. The scientific method is founded on the idea that experiments are repeatable and that observable phenomena have naturalistic causes. This may turn out to be untrue, but to date, we have never had this principle violated. It's important to understand that it's non-trivial to engineer a violation of this principle. If gravity stopped working tomorrow, a scientist would want to know why — he takes it on faith, I suppose, that there is a reason. In order for the scientific method to be unworkable, gravity would not only have to stop working tomorrow, it would also have to do so for no reason whatsoever. It's not just that the future will be like the past, that doesn't adequately capture it. It's that there are reasons for things that happen, and that we are able to understand these reasons.
This might not be true, of course — in fact, it's very likely that there are some things we simply aren't capable of understanding, much as there are many things an ant is not capable of understanding. However, saying that because there are likely to be things we aren't capable of understanding that we should give up on trying to understand what we are capable of understanding is defeatism.
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Hmm. I think the real question is this: If I put Richard Dawkins and Ann Coulter in a room together, will they annihilate each other? Even if I can't harvest the result as energy, man, sounds like a win/win situation to me!
Re:The interesting question is who created us? (Score:4, Informative)