Posted on 12/18/2013 9:50:32 AM PST by Theoria
A dinosaur hobbyist who made his name as a Microsoft multimillionaire published a scientific paper on Monday alleging “serious errors and irregularities” in dinosaur research involving some of the world’s top paleontologists.
The research, some of it dating to the 1990s, analyzed skeletons of different ages to estimate how quickly dinosaurs grew. For example, a 2001 paper, published in the journal Nature, estimates that the giant dinosaur Apatosaurus had a growth spurt of 12,000 pounds in a year.
The papers, particularly a 2004 paper in Nature on the growth of Tyrannosaurus Rex, were influential in offering an explanation for why some dinosaurs were much larger than their relatives and slashed decades off the estimated life span of the creatures.
The accuser is Nathan P. Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft who is well known in the worlds of avant-garde cuisine and patent law. The lead author of the papers in question is Gregory M. Erickson, a professor of anatomy and paleobiology at Florida State University.
Dr. Myhrvold ’s article, published by the journal PLoS One, says Dr. Erickson’s papers contain major mistakes, including graphs that do not match the data and curves that do not match the reported equations. And Dr. Myhrvold’s revised estimates put the maximum growth rate of Apatosaurus at about a tenth of what Dr. Erickson and his colleagues had reported.
Dr. Erickson declined to be interviewed, but issued an email statement noting that the papers had been the work of teams of scientists and had been peer-reviewed.
Dr. Myhrvold’s “reinterpretation of our data, although reaching moderately different conclusions on a species by species basis, strongly supports the cardinal conclusions that we reached regarding how dinosaurs grew,” the statement said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
ping
“...papers contain major mistakes, including graphs that do not match the data and curves that do not match the reported equations.”
Well, sheet! We get that every DAY from The White House!
I would assume they grew quickly early on and growth slowed as they approached adulthood.
Wait, the science isn’t “settled”??
Science is never settled of course
“the giant dinosaur Apatosaurus had a growth spurt of 12,000 pounds in a year.”
-I had a live-in mother-law who did just that.
As we have learned from the antics of the alleged Climate Scientists, peer review is a joke as a quality control mechanism on the Science.
As an exercise in crony Political Correctness it works quite well.
Hey, was this paper vetted the same way as the papers with false research findings? If so, how do we know if the finding are true? ;-)
Yeah, well the science of bleeding people to balance their bodily humors was peer reviewed and widely accepted by scientists for centuries - but that didn't make it right.
The quotes from the co-authors (essentially, “hey, he did that part”) and the lack of questions during the peer review process don’t say good things about the system.
It seems the rush to get published and have your name as a co-author, and the lack of the peer review checks and real data review, has caused the system to fail.
...and hence we get “Climate Change” as settled science...
*“...papers contain major mistakes, including graphs that do not match the data and curves that do not match the reported equations.”
Well, sheet! We get that every DAY from The White House!*
Also sounds like any and every document by those promoting the Climate Change scam!
Peer-review is vulnerable to clique-capture, where a group of scientists tend to control the peer review process at the major journal(s) of their field, and ensure that their stuff gets exposure, and the careers of people who disagree with them get cut short. As you note, one major example of this is the "Climate Science" debacle.
Better would be TRUE "peer review", where a paper gets put on a website, and everybody in the academic community gets a shot at rendering their critiques.
Maybe I missed it, but what qualifications does this person have to challenge a complex bio-paleontological theory like this?
“The accuser is Nathan P. Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft who is well known in the worlds of avant-garde cuisine and patent law.”
A little bleeding isn’t bad for some people. ;-)
“. . . what qualifications does this person have . . .”
Does a brain count?
Or was it just the statistics and mathematics he was challenging?
'Dr. Erickson was one of the reviewers and argued strongly against publication. While praising Dr. Myhrvold’s accomplishments and saying the calculations appeared to be numerically correct, Dr. Erickson said the paper would not advance scientific understanding.'
LOL!
I see. I jumped in too fast (again). :/
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