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.
Every single species is constantly reproducing within its own genetic pool. To ask "which one arrived most recently?" requires us to know the exact status and most recent history of every single species on Earth. We just don't.
Plus, once you start counting things like 'ring species' the very definition of a unique 'species' gets a little hazy:
http://www.origins.tv/darwin/rings.htm
The gene pool starts to look more like a swamp.
This: 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.
alone shows the TO argument to be overstated.
As far as the *same* element, it is never the *same* and if you don;t understand that you do not understand molecular evolutionary biology.
Max's argument is too pat and simply wrong in light of evidence that has come to light since it was written.
So there is no such thing as evolution
it just takes somethings longer to be born than
others. I think I am starting to get the hang of it now.
To ask "which one arrived most recently?" requires us to know the exact status and most recent history of every single species on Earth. We just don't.
But I thought from reading these threads
that you guys knew EVERYTHING.
Now I am starting to lose confidence in you.
"So there is no such thing as evolution..."
Um, no, nothing I said could even come close to saying that.
"...it just takes somethings longer to be born than
others. I think I am starting to get the hang of it now."
I don't think so. :)
Dunno. And, as far as the ToE is concerned, it doesn't care. All that matters is that first thing got around to making a second thing that was slightly different. "Descent with modification."
Sorry but that what it sounded like to me.
The whole 'fast' and 'slow' thing is kind of confusing until you remember that evolutionary bilogists usually talk on time scales of millions of years. Speciation can be 'rapid' in the sense that it can take only a few thousand generations to achieve. You are STILL talking about many thousands of years for something like humans which have life spans in the decades. Bacteria can go through the same number of generations in a few years, and striking evolutionary changes have been seen in just that amount of time.
The 'random seed' for evolution is the small amount of genetic differnce you share with your parents. You are not a clone of your parents, you are a combination of the two, and yet unique in yourself. Plus, small mutations may have arisen, most of which will be completely unnoticeable. It is the addition of many such small changes that result in a changed species over many generations.
These are elements that infected these species after they split. And they are not found in any kind of coherent pattern. This paper simply reports that they are present in these species.
As far as the *same* element, it is never the *same* and if you don;t understand that you do not understand molecular evolutionary biology.
Sure they are.
However, at least five different examples of nearly identical retroviral sequences embedded at the same position in human and chimpanzee DNA have been reported (Bonner et al. PNAS 79:4709, 1982; Dangel et al. Immunogenetics 42:41, 1995; Svensson et al Immunogenetics 41:74,1995; Medstrand & Mager J Virol 72:9782, 1998; Barbulescu et al. Curr Biol 9:861, 1999),
Of course they may have accumulated some mutations, but clearly these ERVs cited in those examples diverged from a single sequence. And their location is the most telling.
Ya'll's replies are getting longer and longer
and making less and less sense.
"Sorry but that what it sounded like to me."
That's understandable. :)
Why don't you tell us what the first lifeform on earth was oh Wisest of mystics?
The origins of life have nothing to do with evolution. No wonder you're confused; you've been going through life with a horrible misconception of the nature of evolution. I hope I've done a little to shed some light on this for you.
Why don't you tell us what the first lifeform on earth was oh Wisest of mystics?
The Heavens
I hope I've done a little to shed some light on this for you.
I hate to disappointed you
I was afraid of that. Sometimes ignorance can be quite tenacious.
Here, ? These are elements that infected these species after they split.
If germ line infection is this common -- which it seems to be -- seeing or not seeing comonalities in organisms sharing common descent is not as important as stressed by the evangelists at to.
This is the genomic era and old fears and prejudices and defensive tracts such as those at to are even more passe than ever.
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