Posted on 03/05/2006 10:14:03 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Five decades after it was revealed as a forgery, the Piltdown man still haunts paleoanthropology. Now, thanks to the disgraced stem cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang, cell biology has a high-profile scandal of its own to live down. Few recent papers in biology have soared as high in acclaim as Hwang's 2004 and 2005 announcements of cloning human embryonic stem cells -- or plummeted as fast into infamy with the discovery that they were rank fakes.
Embryonic stem cell (ESC) research is no less promising today than it was before Hwang's deceit was revealed; most investigators continue to believe that it will eventually yield revolutionary medical treatments. That no one has yet derived ESCs from cloned human embryos simply means that the science is less advanced than has been supposed over the past two years.
Still, Hwang has badly sullied the reputation of a field that already has more than its share of political and public relations problems. Some longtime opponents of ESC research will undoubtedly argue that Hwang's lies only prove that the investigators cannot be trusted to conduct their work ethically, and the public may believe them. This is one more crime against science for which Hwang should be ashamed. (A minor footnote to this affair is our removal of Hwang from the 2005 Scientific American 50 list; see the retraction on page 16.)
In recent years, fabricated data and other fakery have been uncovered in work on materials, immunology, breast cancer, brain aneurysms, the discovery of new elements and other subjects. As the volume of publication rises, fraud will probably rise with it. Because of the growing financial ties between university researchers and corporations, not to mention the jockeying for leadership among nations in high-stakes areas such as stem cells, some scientists may feel more pressure to deliver results quickly -- even if they have to make them up.
These affairs have something in common with the Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass scandals that not long ago rocked mainstream journalism: all these scams exploited the trust that editors extend to submitting authors. The editors and peer reviewers of scientific journals cannot always verify that a submitted paper's results are true and honest; rather their main job is to check whether a paper's methodology is sound, its reasoning cogent and its conclusions noteworthy. Disconfirmation can only follow publication. In that sense, the Hwang case shows how science's self-correcting mechanism is supposed to work.
Yet it is important not to brush off the Hwang case as a fluke without considering its lessons for the future. For instance, Hwang's papers had many co-authors, few of whom seem to have been party to the cover-ups. But what responsibilities should co-authors have for making sure that papers bearing their names are at the least honest?
We should also think hard about whether Hwang's deceit went undetected for months because so many scientists and science journalists wanted to believe that ESC research was progressing rapidly, because that would hasten the arrival of miraculous therapies and other biomedical wonders. Extraordinary results need to be held suspect until confirmed independently. Hwang is guilty of raising false expectations, but too many of us held the ladder for him.
My position is you can't tell one species from another in the early stages of development. I have given everyone here an opportunity to prove me wrong.
Go for it.
You have to get from a blastocyte to a multicell organism with a neural tube through some process.
Why ......
What does that have to do with embryology.
The easiest way of telling one species from another is to go to the chromosomes.
The cromosome and gene pattern will differentiate from a single cell in any species.
Freaks and genetic misfits do not prove your point.
Don't know, but some people seem to think publishing images of embryos is important, and some people seem to think it would be easy to tell one from another.
Some people think it's important to say that published images of embryos have errors. I have asked to have the specific errors pointed out.
Chromosome count is not as important as you think it is.
the human embryo does not start with a tail
plus
the human newborn does not have a tail
yet
at one point, the human embryo does develop and then reabsorb a tail.
no need for this last, if humans were indeed "special creations" rather than mods of earlier life-forms
possibly.
it is also possible that the cell and molecular biology curriculum at Tulane was more rigorous in 1988-2002 than it was wherever you took college biology courses.
How in the world can one say that a creationist is incapable of noticing an error?
The astute reader will note that "Mamzelle" is grossly misrpresenting what Virginia-American actually wrote. There's a vast difference between V.A. saying that he/she is not aware of an error being exposed by a "CRIDer", and claiming that creationists are "incapable of noticing" an error.
Mad assertion.
There was nothing "mad" about Virginia-American's *actual* comment, but Mamzelle's response very much appears to be a dishonest accusation, used as a "straw man" in order to dishonestly run down a fellow Freeper. This is typical behavior for anti-evolutionists, I see it all too frequently, both here and elsehwere.
But it does raise an issue which needs to be addressed: Anti-evolutionists make so many "errors", of such a gross and obvious nature, that one has to ask whether they do it out of dishonesty, or mere incompetence, because making so many "errors" that many entire websites (maintained by scientists, not by other anti-evolution creationists) are dedicated towards tracking all of the anti-evolutionists' errors.
For example, here are *hundreds* of example of just *one* kind of creationist "error":
The Quote Mine Project: Or, Lies, Damned Lies and Quote MinesWant more? Here is an excellent example of repeated distortions of the actual science by an AECreationist book filling children's heads with gross mispresresentations: Skeletons in Your Closet.The Revised Quote Book: Looking at how Creationists Quote Evolutionists
Creationist Arguments: Misquotes
Quote-Mining...The Tradition Continues - ICR Representative Frank Sherwin Visits Eureka College
Misquotations in the Creation Book
Creationist "Out of Context" Quotes
Famous Quotes found in books (and misused by creationists)
And: A Creationist Exposed.
And: ICR Whoppers. From the Talk.Origins Archive
And: Lying For Jesus: Duane Gish, InterVarsity, and Creationism at Rutgers
And: Some Verifiable Instances of Creationist Dishonesty
And: Creationism: Bad Science or Immoral Pseudoscience?
And: Lucy's Knee Joint: A Case Study in Creationists' Willingness to Admit their Errors
And: Missing Supernova Remnants as Evidence of a Young Universe? A Case of Fabrication
And: Icons of Evolution FAQs (creationist Wells spends a whole book distorting science)
And: Creationist Lies and Blunders
...how many more would you like? I can keep this up all day long. AECreationists have grossly mispresented science and made "errors" thousands upon thousands of times, yet never seem to "notice" or correct each other. Instead, they just repeat each other's falsehoods, even *after* the "error" has been publicly exposed.
*too much wine*
1988-1992
No, he is not, he is using examples to point out the very obvious flaws in *your* claim.
And members of the same species with different numbers of chromosomes is *not* a matter of "freaks or statistical outliers". It's far more common than you're aware, and you used your false presumptions about the stability of chromosome counts to lead you to your false conclusion.
Miniature Siberian swine, for example, have chromosome counts (in different individuals) of 36, 37, and 38. Among 41 tested individuals of the neotropical water rat Nectomys, chromosome counts of 52, 53, 56 and 57 were found. In the tufted deer (Elaphodus cephalophus), chromosome counts of 46, 47, and 48 were found. In the Lemur fulvus collaris, chromosome counts of 48, 50, 51, and 52 were found. In the owl monkey (Aotus), chromosome counts of 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, and 54 were found. In the Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx), 8 of 62 individuals in one herd were found to have two fewer chromosomes due to a fusion of chromosomes #17 and #19 -- this was traced back to an event two generations earlier, since the ancestries of the individuals were known. In the Black Rat, chromosome counts of 38, 40, and 42 were found. In 50 tested rainbow trout, chromosome counts of 59, 60, 61, 62 and 63 were found. In the okapi, chromosome counts of 44, 45, and 46 have been found. In the common house mouse Mus domesticus), a wide range of chromosome counts between 44 to 80 have been found.
[Thunderous applause!]
He.
Gotta love the self-correcting nature of CRIDer publications. You know, how if one of 'em misquotes someone, the others all pile on to correct it, even if it weakens the case that was being made
totally unlike science, where conformity rules...
[/sarc]
And your point is?
Then explain why whales have the same developmental stages as 4-legged mammals, and snakes have the same developmental stages as 4-legged reptiles. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint, but none from a "design" standpoint nor from your hand-waving non-explanation.
You have to get from 1 cell to a complex organism through some process.
Indeed, but thanks for stating the trivially obvious. The real question, though, is why do various animals go through *particular* developmental processes relative to each other? It's the details which reveal the underlying truths.
The problem with captioning is I don't give a fig about species. I care about date....
Well then go have dinner and a movie with someone. Or eat a date instead of eating a fig. Or whatever in the heck you're trying to say here in lieu of actually making a valid point.
Human can be differentiated from other species from 1 cell dependent on the chromosome count.
This is utter nonsense. Humans have 46 chromosomes (43 if you're counting pairs). So does the common house gecko. So do some species of rabbit. So does the prairie vole. So do wood mice. So do rats. So does the tailed frog. And so on and so on.
I did know that, for cutting and other industrial applications that artificial diamonds were preferred.
As far as jewelry, I don't know that it will ever come to the point that artificial diamonds will take hold. You can purchase a cubic zirconia for a few hundred dollars that resembles a diamond to the naked eye. But young women don't want such a thing for their engagement.
Drawings can't be faked. They're either drawings or they're not.
But Haeckel didn't throw images at random and ask the reader to guess.
He drew -- falsely -- a fish, chicken, human etc. at different stages of embroyonic development then placed them side by side claiming to show they were similar.
To duplicate what he did, you'd have to show photos of different creatures at the same stage as Miller & Levine do here
This makes the project much easier and is much more illustrative of Haeckel's scientific sin.
Social science and history texts, yes. Science texts, no.
They are loaded cover to cover with inaccuracies and deliberately so.
Science texts? Please give me some examples.
It is far worse in the area of history and social sciences but the bull has invaded science.
Evidence please.
The fraudulent drawings have been used for the past 30 years to support the abortion myth of fetus as blob.
I doubt it very much. Please provide some evidence. I am not going to take your word for it.
Any science book that is pushing the global warming myth is destined to have other pseudo sciences in it.
Global warming isn't a myth.
Just because a single group of authors issued a correction does not mean that other authors have corrected.
Okay, so please point out a textbook that failed to make the correction.
It is your source cited and your place to prove otherwise.
You made the accusation that textbook authors failed to make the correction. The burder of proof is on you. All I did was cite a counterexample.
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