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.
Do you disagree with me here?
If it's totally explicable from an ecolutionary standpoint, then why sould it not make sense as intelligent design? Does it work? Yes. So it would make sense in intelligent design. Have scientists come up with a better design that would work more ecfficiently? Again, there is the presumption that scientists have decided that they know all the reasons and ramifications of why something is the way it is and there is not some purpose to why it exists the way it does that they haven't figured out yet. After all, wasn't it just recently that they finally figured out how bees could fly? When scientists can establish that they have all the answers of why things are the way they are, and can disprove the idea the it was intelligently designed, then I'll believe it.
They were inaccurate. They may have been the basis for the drawings in many texts, but his theories were almost universally rejected. Creationists trot him out as if anybody has taken his theories seriously for the last 100 years. As I said with the text I have, the pictures are based on Haeckel, but the text clearly states he was wrong. I have no reason to believe that this was different in the vast majority of texts. And my text came out in 1993.
How do you define "stage." Let's see the objective definition. It seems odd to ignore the obvious definition, which would be the point in development at which specific features appear.
Yes.
Crazily, people like itchy man deny that they are even inaccurate.
Patrick henry linked to his rambling comment on it.
These guys are not committed to the science obviously.
College profs could not teach in public schools in NY, at least, because they don't have a 4 years *teaching* degree with masters in education, but they are qualified to teach the college education majors. IOW, the profs can teach the future teachers but not the students those teachers will be teaching. And an education degree is totally useless outside the education field. Liberal logic makes my brain smoke.
Oh, I was sure it was Richard Dawkins. He's got such a critical mind, you know.
ecolutionary=evolutionary
Proof reading doesn't work well when tired. Spell check might help.
50 x's Spell check is my friend,...
Well from now on point them here to let them know the proper response is "no good answer"
I've done that. I was told I was reading his mind and that I just didn't want to accept that Darwin recanted.
That particular individual is hopeless and you should not respond.
You additions (Can't Do That!) are nice examples of the kind of deceit that is common with anti-evos; Darwin didn;t say that nor did he imply that.
Actually, parenthetical insertions using a different typestyle are not considered deceptive -- except among the most delusional paranoids. Anyway, Darwin most certainly implied "can't do that" concerning finding the required gradiations for the development of the eye in lineal ancestors or existing vertebrata. Go back and read the paragraph again.
When all else fails say God did it :-) . . .Nothing he said even implied this
"But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?"
Frankly, I don't think Darwin believed in God but he didn't have an materialist answer for his reader, so he punted.
" Evolution is a word sometimes ill-defined in the debate." I said that creationists say there is no evidence. This is a lie.
There is no evidence that all life came from a single cell via natural, undirected means. There, I'm I lying?
And you are too blinded by your biases and and your fears to dare look at the links I gave you. Because they show top creationists in shameful lying. The claim is made that if people accept evolution, they will act like animals and reject all morality.
That's an opinion, not a lie.
That sounds like a fine definition to me.
Then the images I posted are taken at similar stages of development.
Liberal logic is Nux Vomica logic.
Figure out what works and then do the opposite, when it fails claim it was underfunded.
And do you know the big irony? Someone is likely to see that and NOT realize it refers to him. LOL.
Take your image of a mouse, put it next to the image of a fish at the same stage of development and see if viewers can't readily tell them apart.
As usual, the reader will note that tallhappy is posting his hallucinations as if they had some sort of factual basis. I have said nothing of the sort concerning Haeckel's drawings. I *have* in the past written something quite different (e.g. that the faking might not have been *intentional*, and instead might have been due to carelessness, presumption, etc.) which someone who is suffering from extreme forms of mental illness might conceivably be able to grossly misunderstand/misrepresent in the way that tallhappy has. So who then is being "imbecilic" here?
-- and the equally dull patrick henry promoting itchyman's peculiar closed minded dogmatism.
Since it is hardly "peculiar closed minded dogmatism" to merely point out that misrepresentations may be due to error and that outright fraud is not the only possible explanation, one has to wonder whether tallhappy habitually posts drunk, or is just this plain stupid. Either way, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Furthermore, I just thought I'd mention for no particular reason that there are good medications for the treatment of antisocial disorders which cause bitter emotional outbursts at inappropriate targets.
Thye are laughable clowns really.
"Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy."
It could be better:
From laryngeal nerve palsy (recurrent) (in GP Notebook)
Recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy mainly presents with voice changes.
The causes of recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy varies according to the side that is affected. The variation with respect to cause is because of the very different anatomy of the two nerves.
The left recurrent laryngeal nerve has a long course which extends down into the chest and loops under the arch of the aorta to return to the larynx.
The right recurrent laryngeal nerve is shorter and loops around the subclavian artery.
Thus, the left nerve is more susceptible to disease than the right.
...So it would make sense in intelligent design.
Not really. It's rather like you have an electric drill. You could plug it in near where you're going to use it (Superior nerve, right side). but instead, you plug it into an extension cord, loop the cord around a nearby table leg (early embryo), and then move the table halfway across the room (embryo development).
You can still use the drill, but the odds of someone tripping over the cord and unplugging it are much greater than if you had simply plugged the drill into a nearby socket.
From the source:
This diagram shows the "long path" of the left recurrent laryngeal nerve (left RLN). After it branches off the vagus nerve, the left RLN loops around the aortic arch in the chest cavity and then courses back into the neck.
This long course makes it at higher risk for injury compared with the shorter course of the right RLN which does not run through the chest cavity.
See the difference between the left and right sides.
Have scientists come up with a better design that would work more ecfficiently?
Yes. A straight run from the brainstem. Less material, less chance of injury. Think of the path the superior nerve takes. Why can't both do it like this?
In a giraffe, no one's ever been able to think of any reason for a 15 foot nerve when a 1 foot one would do.
Again, there is the presumption that scientists have decided that they know all the reasons and ramifications of why something is the way it is and there is not some purpose to why it exists the way it does that they haven't figured out yet.
It has been figured out. The nerves in a fish are perfectly logical. But the changes in a mammalian embryo force it to take the circuitous path.
After all, wasn't it just recently that they finally figured out how bees could fly?
When scientists can establish that they have all the answers of why things are the way they are, and can disprove the idea the it was intelligently designed, then I'll believe it.
No one claims to have all the answers. But the answer to this one feature of anatomy does seem clear.
the Korean War saw the rise of college deferments for students in non-vital majors.
Cowards took advantage of this.
They gravitated towards the easiest courses (liberal arts, especially the soft pseudosciences and literature, which lack objective standards by nature)
They then entered education professionally.
And the ball started rolling.
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