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.
Tell that to PFC Doss. I find those most vociferously anti-pacifist are those least likely to answer their own call to duty.
Yes. or the Precambrian rabbit?
No.
To advance to the level of theory, it has to account for all the evidence that the ToE does, and then some.
ToE can account for any and all evidence.
There's no evidence possible it can't account for.
The erv is a perfect example. There are erv-like inserts that aren't shared by all commonly descendent organisms. Does it then overturn evolution? No. The idea is some insertions came afterward, or were deleted etc...
Whatever is seen is ispo facto the trace of evolution.
Of course.
I wonder why buffoons like you obsess about it so much.
Dont bring this up. Last time he just randomly cut and pasted abstracts from irrelevant papers off pubmed.
...but that it shows a lack of planning.
IF the nerve had been designed (at least by any engineer I can imagine), it would resemble the one on the right side.
The circuitous route it takes is an example of the fact that evolution always is constrained by what's already present.
I can't understand whyn such buffoons think they are the keepers of knowledge.
How? By showing that the design is uneconomical and would never be thought of by a human engineer?
This doesn't falsify ID, or even the "I" part. As other posters have pointed out, "His ways are not (necessarily) our ways."
It could have been designed for a purpose that we may discover someday, or that we never discover.
Who knows? The designer.
ID can't fail.
The chimp genome *itself* is not irrelevant.
That particular study of the chimp genome you referenced was.
Then you cut and pasted a bunch of stuff that nothing to do with anything in a futile attempt at a smoke screen.
I can't understand whyn such buffoons think they are the keepers of knowledge.
I never proclaimed to be the "keeper" of any knowledge, however unlike you I actually make an effort to *comprehend* what I read.
Try it sometime.
Thanks.
I get what both of you are saying. My comment was about what it *sounded* like he was saying. It was just a first impression that I got from his comment, and the point I was trying to get across (that I guess I didn't very well), was that if someone is confused or on the fence about evolution, if someone says something that implies evolution is illogical, it's going to be harder to convinced him why you believe it's right. Kind of like *Evolution isn't logical but it's the way it happened*. And I could see the response being, *Okaaay, And this is science?* Science and logic are connected in the minds of most people from all the experience I've had dealing with non-scientific types.
Thanks, that's what I was getting at. The posts are coming fast and furious this afternoon!
Thanks, I should slow down and try to be clearer. "unplanned" is more like what I meant than "ilogical".
Well then you better throw it out because there are these sort of sequences shared by some hominids but not others.
Repetitive sequences are not the simplistic insertions described by quasi-religious tracts at talk origins.
The last time you were seeing "Haeckelism" everywhere, there wasn't any anywhere.
Once again we are reminded that tallhappy has very little actual understanding of basic genetics and his postings are just so much bluster.
The genomes of the great apes in these studes contain something like 3 billion base pairs spread over 22 chromosomes. The ERVs discussed here for example, that *are* shared between closely related organisms are not simply present in these species, but they are found at the *precisely the same locus*.
What are the odds that in each of these examples, these events all occurred independently?
Against this background, it was surprising to find that the chimpanzee genome has two active retroviral elements (PtERV1 and PtERV2) that are unlike any older elements in either genome; these must have been introduced by infection of the chimpanzee germ line. The smaller family (PtERV2) has only a few dozen copies, which nonetheless represent multiple (approx5−8) invasions, because the sequence differences among reconstructed subfamilies are too great (approx8%) to have arisen by mutation since divergence from human. It is closely related to a baboon endogenous retrovirus (BaEV, 88% ORF2 product identity) and a feline endogenous virus (ECE-1, 86% ORF2 product identity). The larger family (PtERV1) is more homogeneous and has over 200 copies. Whereas older ERVs, like HERV-K, are primarily represented by solo LTRs resulting from LTR−LTR recombination, more than half of the PtERV1 copies are still full length, probably reflecting the young age of the elements. PtERV1-like elements are present in the rhesus monkey, olive baboon and African great apes but not in human, orang-utan or gibbon, suggesting separate germline invasions in these species68.
This is but one example.
Talk Origins is not a scientific site and it would be best to not get your info there.
I also have referenced the sister article "A genome-wide comparison of recent chimpanzee and human segmental duplications" from the same Sept 1 2005 Nature issue.
TO simplifies things and is akin to a Jack Chick publicatiom. TO often is wrong as well.
To reiterate, TO is not a scientific site and you'd be better served to not get and regurgiate your material from there.
It is never as simple as TO evangelists try to make out.
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