Posted on 02/19/2005 7:36:30 AM PST by Woodworker
Panel says professor of human origins made up data, plagiarized works
A flamboyant anthropology professor, whose work had been cited as evidence Neanderthal man once lived in Northern Europe, has resigned after a German university panel ruled he fabricated data and plagiarized the works of his colleagues. Reiner Protsch von Zieten, a Frankfurt university panel ruled, lied about the age of human skulls, dating them tens of thousands of years old, even though they were much younger, reports Deutsche Welle. "The commission finds that Prof. Protsch has forged and manipulated scientific facts over the past 30 years," the university said of the widely recognized expert in carbon data in a prepared statement.
Protsch's work first came under suspicion last year during a routine investigation of German prehistoric remains by two other anthropologists. "We had decided to subject many of these finds to modern techniques to check their authenticity so we sent them to Oxford [University] for testing," one of the researchers told The Sunday Telegraph. "It was a routine examination and in no way an attempt to discredit Prof. von Zieten." In their report, they called Protsch's 30 years of work a "dating disaster."
Among their findings was an age of only 3,300 years for the female "Bischof-Speyer" skeleton, found with unusually good teeth in Northern Germany, that Protsch dated to 21,300 years. Another dating error was identified for a skull found near Paderborn, Germany, that Protsch dated at 27,400 years old. It was believed to be the oldest human remain found in the region until the Oxford investigations indicated it belonged to an elderly man who died in 1750. The Herne anthropological museum, which owned the Paderborn skull, did its own tests following the unsettling results. "We had the skull cut open and it still smelt," said the museum's director. "We are naturally very disappointed."
Protsch, known for his love of Cuban cigars and Porsches, did not comment on the commission's findings, but in January he told the Frankfurter Neue Presse, "This was a court of inquisition. They don't have a single piece of hard evidence against me." The fallout from Protsch's false dating of northern European bone finds is only beginning.
Chris Stringer, a Stone Age specialist and head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said: "What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside. We are having to rewrite prehistory." "Anthropology now has to revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 B.C.," added Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the University of Greifswald. Frankfurt University's president, Rudolf Steinberg, apologized for the university's failure to curb Protsch's misconduct for decades. "A lot of people looked the other way," he said.
Ah...
I see your intent (maybe).
It is kinda like DNA: these rudimentary, basic functions.
Without the comments, it would be as we find ourselves at this early stage of trying to understand DNA 'instructions'.
We have a finished unit, can see how it operates (a little) and are trying to reverse engineer the code.
Cool!!
;^)
Darwinist fideist witch hunters strike again.
Must be a pretty desperate bunch.
Science's New Heresy Trial: (Persecution of Scientific Thought)
Discovery Institute News
February 18, 2005
Gene Edward Veith, World Magazine
Science is typically praised as open-ended and free, pursuing the evidence wherever it leads. Scientific conclusions are falsifiable, open to further inquiry, and revised as new data emerge. Science is free of dogma, intolerance, censorship, and persecution.
By these standards, Darwinists have become the dogmatists. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, supported by American taxpayers, are punishing one of their own simply for publishing an article about Intelligent Design.
Stephen Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge and is a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, wrote an article titled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." As Mr. Meyer explained it to WORLD, his article deals with the so-called Cambrian explosion, that point in the fossil record in which dozens of distinct animal body forms suddenly spring into existence. Darwinists themselves, he showed through a survey of the literature, admit that they cannot explain this sudden diversity of form in so little time.
Mr. Meyer argued that the need for new proteins, new genetic codes, new cell structures, new organs, and new species requires specific "biological information." And "information invariably arises from conscious rational activity." That flies in the face of the Darwinist assumption that biological origins are random.
Mr. Meyer submitted his paper to the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scientific journal affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History. The editor, Rick Sternberg, a researcher at the museum with two Ph.D.s in biology, forwarded the article to a panel of three peer reviewers. In scientific and other academic scholarship, submitting research to the judgment of other experts in the field ensures that published articles have genuine merit. Each of the reviewers recommended that, with revisions, the article should be published. Mr. Meyer made the revisions and the article was published last August.
Whereupon major academic publications—Science, Nature, Chronicles of Higher Education—expressed outrage. The anger was focused not on the substance of the article, but on the mere fact that a peer-reviewed scientific journal would print such an article.
So the wrath of the Darwinists fell on Mr. Sternberg, the editor. Although he had stepped down from the editorship, his supervisors at the Smithsonian took away his office, made him turn in his keys, and cut him off from access to the collections he needs for his research. He is also being subjected to the sectarian religious discipline of "shunning." His colleagues are refusing to talk to him or even greet him in the hallways.
His supervisors also staged an inquisition about Mr. Sternberg's religious and even political beliefs. Mr. Sternberg, who describes himself as a Catholic with lots of questions, has filed a case alleging discrimination not just on the grounds of religion but "perceived" religion.
Critics of Mr. Sternberg say that the article should not have been published because the American Association for the Advancement of Science has proclaimed that Intelligent Design is "unscientific by definition." As Mr. Meyer points out: "Rather than critique the paper on its scientific merits, they appeal to a doctrinal statement."
Historically, said Mr. Meyer, science has sought "the best explanation, period, wherever the evidence leads." But now the scientific establishment is requiring something else: "the best materialistic explanation for phenomenon." That rules out non-materialistic explanations from the onset, demanding adherence to the worldview that presumes the material realm is all that exists.
David Klinghoffer broke the story of Mr. Sternberg's mistreatment in The Wall Street Journal. The attempts to discredit him, Mr. Meyer said, have resulted in hundreds of scientists from around the world requesting and downloading the paper (available from www.discovery.org/csc/).
Mr. Meyer said that many scientists secretly agree with elements of Intelligent Design but are afraid to go public. Critics tried to force Mr. Sternberg to reveal the names of the peer reviewers—which are supposed to remain anonymous—but he refused. Darwinists shifted the discussions to evolution as a worldview, while avoiding its admitted failures to account for what Darwin purported to explain, namely, the origin of species.
The virulence of the attempts to suppress Intelligent Design demonstrates the Darwinists' insecurity. "You don't resort to authoritarianism," observed Mr. Meyer, "if you can answer it."
I'm surprised Balrog didn't get there first!
Cheers!
Huh?
They WHY are the "E" so AGAINST it being discussed?
Several reasons...
1) If it is designed, then you run against the sticky problem of a designer.
A designer can be supernatural or natural.
If the designer is supernatural, science has no reliable way (according to its methodolgy) of treating the designer.
If the designer is natural, then that just pushes some of the conudrums further away from us, and introduces what may well turn out to be unnecessary complications. "Occam's Razor" (*)
2) If we accept the assumption that the DNA works in a regular fashion, with definite, more-or-less specifiable behaviour given a specific set of conditions, then we can still learn to probe, then to control its behaviour, then to get rich or famous or both by controlling its behaviour. All this without worrying about how it got there or how its properties arose.
In other words, discovering how it works is not the same as discovering how it got there. So for some scientists, worrying about ultimate causes may often be a waste of time from what they'd rather be doing.
And even though there may be the possibility that by delving "the mind of the Maker" and all that, we could find out a lot of nifty-cool stuff, we're not sure that we CAN delve the mind of the Maker...in fact, science doesn't have too good of a track record in handling competing claims of deities, since you can't generally catch them in a test tube. So science prefers to stick with what it knows best.
Cheers! (*)
"Thou shalt not needlessly multiply entities"
as opposed to Saruman's Razor,
"Thou shalt not needlessly multiply ENTS"
Hmm, on second thought, make that Saruman's Axe. :-)
The difference is that while the majority of mutations may happen to be damaging to an individual, once in a while a mutation may pop up that is helpful.
You just need a large enough population for "mutation fodder" so that the whole group doesn't die out first.
Oh yes, and stable enough conditions so that mutation remains useful or advantageous and thus will be likely to spread--no use evolving extra-large gills just in time for your lake to evaporate in a drought :-)
Oh yes, and lack of inconvenient massive environmental changes of other types which obviate your survival adaptations towards other environmental factors--the Ankylosaur or (was it Edmontonia?) had great armor for protecting against predators, but the armor probably wouldn't help much against Iridium-rich meteors.
Or in the case of computers, a porn-spewing virus which takes over your hard drive... Cheers!
Can you tell me whether or not my program accomplishes what I said it should accomplish, and was I efficient with my coding, or are you just going to springboard into analogies even though I never made such direct comparisons?
Yawn. That's the Discovery Institute's spin version of it, anyway. The reality is, shall we say, somewhat different.
Congratulations, you've just posted the equivalent of a Michael Moore report on some action of the Bush administration -- heavy on conspiracy theories, vitriol, negative spin, one-sided presentation of the facts, etc. I'm not going to waste my time beating this dead horse again in order to show you how, though -- check out just about any of the existing threads on it.
Next time try getting your news from a more objective source, the Discovery Institute is hardly the place to get any information about a science-related story, unless you *like* heavy doses of one-sided spin.
"The virulence of the attempts to suppress Intelligent Design demonstrates the Darwinists' insecurity"
There is no need to suppress ID, as long as you think it is amusing to watch rubes give millions of bucks to conmen.
Reminds me of a contest published in 80 Microcomputing, which called for fastest code to fill the screen with a character and the shortest program to do the same. There were hundreds of distinct entries. I believe the fastest code consisted of 1024 push statements.
Sorry, I think we're miscommunicating.
I agree that there is the *RISK* involved in the natural sciences, of
neglecting the supernatural,
then deciding that by Occam's razor the supernatural is not necessary for what you happen to be studying,
then being so successful at naturalistic predictions that you leave out the supernatural altogether,
then concluding that there is not, and never has been a supernatural,
and as an adjunct assuming that the supernatural is merely, and has only been, an abortive attempt at explanation of the world, rightly superceded by the scientific method.
Apparently some scientists, and some "camp followers" of the scientific endeavor, really DO feel this way.
But NOT ALL.
Leading with a strawman argument will not earn you respect or credence on these threads.
Cheers!
Perhaps they have too much in common with other paid professionals.
Perhaps Creationists fail to notice that the unremonstrated mendacity shown by some devolves upon all the ilk.
Wasn't the number actually 1066? (Which would make William the Conqueror the AntiChrist.)
"Bang bang, she shot me down"
How does it compare with what YOU'VE just replied?
Selective quotation. You do this so often, I don't understand why, because you don't seem that stupid. Read the whole of post #512 again.... I was suggesting a list of possibilities.. Sheeesh. Learn to read!
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