I’d been wondering about the credibility of David L. Abel, an Intelligent Design creationist who claims to work in the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. I tried to track down this foundation with the lofty title, the million dollar prize, and the elaborately specific departments, but the best I’d been able to do was find a google satellite image.
Huh. That looks suspiciously like a suburban house.
So then someone from the Evil Atheist Conspiracy’s vast network of spies and agents decided to drive by and get a picture.
Why, it is someone’s house at that address! It’s a nice but unpretentious little place in a residential suburb. There must be some mistake. This doesn’t look like a fantastic institute of advanced science — it’s got shady trees and a lawn and a basket of flowers by the garage and it looks like a typical two bedroom house.
But wait…what’s that by the hanging basket? It’s a sign of some sort. Look closer…
Yep, that’s the place.
That’s every intelligent design creationism institute of scientific thinking: a cheap sign tacked up on a garage, with some guy with delusions of competence twiddling his thumbs inside.
(Also on Sb)
That sign doesn’t look cheap. It’s not scrawled, all the words are spelled correctly, and there’s even lines at the top and bottom of the sign. It probably cost a good $40 or $50 to get someone to make that sign.
There is one remaining mystery, though. The satellite photo has all those houses with the garage on the right side of the houses; the closeup shows it on the left side. Unless someone flipped one of the photos somewhere, this suggests that there might be some strange transdimensional process going on; dare I suggest it, even alien non-Euclidean geometries.
Nah, someone flipped one of the photos. Or google zoomed in on the wrong house in the neighborhood.
I’m pretty sure that the house your intrepid investigator took a picture of is not the house in the google satellite image.
Actually, the sign does seem to be misspelled. Abel’s formal attribution of his foundation is The Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. The sign says Origin of Life Foundation Incorporated.
The indicated house in the aerial view is not the same house as in the street level view.
late again
Abel probably saved a couple of bucks by not having “science” put on the sign. A penny saved is a penny he can spend on research materials like a Kent Hovind DVD.
The address for the “Foundation” is listed as 113-120 Hedgewood. The google satellite image for 113 looks much more like the right one.
Mystery solved. The address Abel gave for his “foundation” was 113-120 Hedgewood Drive, Greenbelt, MD. The first satellite photo I showed was of 120 Hedgewood Drive; when I told google to just show me 113 Hedgewood, it gave me a satellite photo that matched.
I’ve since corrected the photo here.
Wow. I’m channeling PZ now.
Does that qualify me as some religion or something? I could use the tax break.
Looks to me like PZ’s googlemap is of 120, and the co-conspirator’s snapshots is 113 across the street. The address given had both. Mystery solved.
Now, a question for internet logicians: Is this post a true
Scotsmad hominem? Explain.No, it qualifies you as a mind-controlled minion. YOU WILL SEND ME ALL YOUR MONEY NOW.
Right, like those other people just said. Mystery re-solved, OK?
Darn! I thought google was in on it.
Any car guys here? What’s the white car, a Taurus? A Camry? I’m guessing it’s American. Patriotism is important to religious nuts.
Maybe there’s a secret underground base, almost as large as PZ’s?
In the original post on the Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc, the address is given as “Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc., 113-120 Hedgewood Drive, Greenbelt, MD 20770”.
The house number appears to be 113. It’s three digits and the first two digits are definitely 11.
Yesssssssssssssssss….Master. I shall obey. Although I’m not sure how far a buck seventy-five will get you.
Maybe that explains why the 2008 drive-by picture (from the forum you linked to) was taken on a July day yet there are still dead autumn leaves on his sidewalk and lawn.
It is not an ad hominem. I’m not saying Abel’s arguments about the origin of life are all wrong because he lives in that house.
My argument is that he is misrepresenting himself, pretending to be something he is not, and lying by implication about the scientific authority of his little house in Maryland. If he’d been honest and said he was a retired vet writing about his ideas in his copious spare time, no problem…but no particular authority, either. The fact that he has to lie and claim he’s working in the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics at the Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. is pretty damned dishonest, and a shameless attempt to inflate his credibility.
And really pathetic, too.
The house is just a front. The real facilities are in huge secret cave under than nice grove of trees. Of course the sign out front kind of blows the secrecy. Perhaps he studied under Megamind (or Minion).
Don’t be too hard on garage operations. Some great things started out in garages. Hewlett Packard for instance. And some other outfit.
If the sign just said
Origin of Life
Incorporated
it would at least make a slightly amusing word play.
I’m about to go on my daily constitutional. A buck seventy five just about covers the cost of a cup of tea at the coffeeshop downtown.
Make it so. I’ll expect to find it hot and waiting for me in approximately 15 minutes.
Does Greenbelt have a law forbidding commercial enterprises in residential areas? If so, does this “foundation” (ha!) qualify as a commercial enterprise?
Unquestionably, this guy is a legend in his own mind and actually thinks he’s doing something important. Nobody puts up a silly sign like that unless they’re trying to impress the world at large. Some impression!
To his credit: given the fierce summer weather in the Washington DC area, the one hanging basket we see a closeup of isn’t doing too badly, though it looks like it could use somewhat more water and fertilizer.
If you’re not a “materialist,” that’s all you need.
You do have to say “looks designed” when you see some life now and again, though, to remain bona fide. And if you can fool some idiotic journal into a complicated restatement (intelligence!) of “looks designed,” clearly you’ve arrived as a real science.
Glen Davidson
Isn’t that how Apple started? Well, less twiddling perhaps, but still.
David Klinghoffer’s latest screed in The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/02/02/republicans-and-science
suggests this modest Maryland structure is the forward fire base whence the Discovery Institute’s mind control ray is aimed at DC’s few surviving scientific republicans.
There are diploma mills and now I see there are scientific credentials sign mills too.
I make my own business cards for my carpet services and wedding ceremonies businesses but I never thought of tacking up a “shingle” like this. Maybe I’m missing something. Still, I think I’ll just stick with my homemade wooden sign that simply labels our place “Tranquil Oasis.” Cheaper and less gradiose and ostentatious. It is tranquil here in Verde Village 3 in Cottonwood, Arizona. That sign misleads no one.
With a high sounding name, he can take part in the usual cross breeding unqualified creationist nuts engage in to publish their inane garbage and make it look authoritative so they can quote each other.
Mercury Sable from the late 1980’s. I had one of those. Worst car ever.
Does the “foundation” actually list its address as “113-120”? That’s peculiar. I wonder if the guy actually lives across the street and uses the other house for his business.
It is a Sable, Mercury’s ugly version of a Taurus, and an older one. Among car-folk it has been observed that Mercury versions are always uglier than the Fords. My theory is that they design the Ford, then hand over the design to Mercury with all the hard-points fixed saying “add a little glitz, but you can only change the grill and taillights”, but it remains a mystery.
A lot less twiddling. That’s what’s good about software. You can write it and compile it in your garage without anybody knowing, and with very little means. It’s even true at some extent about electronics. You can build whatever you need in your bedroom with a few dollars, a lenght of copper wire and a soldiering iron.
But it’s not that true for life sciences. Or chemistry. The equipment costs a lot, needs specific premise arrangements, such as filtered vents or magnetic shielding, to operate properly. An NMR spectrometer for instance, necessary for any meaningful modern organic synthesis, will make your neighbors very angry when it starts interfering with their TV reception. You’re bound to be noticed if only for the amount of stuff that gets delivered to you on a daily basis.
And if you don’t need any of that, well, we can safely assume that whatever conclusion you arrive at has been entirely pulled out of your ass. Thinking about things is great, but when you never get out of your braincase to check on the real world, then what you’re thinking rapidly becomes worthless.
It gets worse for Davey –
Check out his list of ‘peer reviewed publications’:
http://davidlabel.blogspot.com/
Looks impressive, doesn’t it? Try this – use a search function and search the page for the title of each paper – it is amazing that each tends to show up many, many times.
Wait there is more?
His amazing book:
http://www.amazon.com/First-Gene-Programming-Messaging-Control/dp/0965798895/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328374119&sr=8-1
To read the blurb, he writes of himself as if he is the ultimate scientific discoverer of all time – pity that he does not realize that question begging is not a good way to set yourself up as a scientific authority.
And the company that printed his amazing book?
Why, it is HIS, and it apparently has ONLY printed HIS book:
http://longviewpressacademic.com/
This guy has the ego or ReMine, the scientific ability of Walt Brown, and the self-publicity gene rivaled only perhaps by Dembski himself.
Also, Apple turned out products that actually worked. The comparison would have been more apt ifWoz & Jobs had spent decades writing press releases & publishing articles describing their invisible prototype, & complaining about the inferiority of HP & IBM & RadioShack, but never bothered getting to the point of chips & wires & code.
Re: Kemist’s post – exactly.
If you’ve ever attempted to trudge through any of Abel’s papers, you will see that he – like nearly all creationists – does not actually do any research, he just “re-interprets” the work of others within his ‘cybernetic’ framework within which he simply assumes that genes were “written” prior to their use, and posits that it is up to others to show that he is wrong.
Classic non-scientific nonsense.
Classic egomaniacal creationist.
As a side note – it is cute how he describes the location of his “foundation” of being just down the road from the Goddard space flight lab (or whatever it is called) – wowee! It MUST be special!
Their real work is underground. Like SHADO. They probably have submarines and tunnels and maybe even an underground motor-pool with tracked vehicles and stuff like that.
#33 PZ Myers says:
That kind of thing has actually happened.
Back before digital SLR cameras came on the scene, there was a company that claimed it was developing what (iirc) it called “digital film” that you could just drop into an existing 35mm SLR.
No sign the product ever existed in reality, just in delusionality or lyality or puffality.
And in the field of software, “vaporware” is an old, honorable scam. Microsoft has used it more than once to block competitors.
LOL! So true!
Well, as someone who works as the head of the Internet Information Division of the Department of Psychohumanistic Science and Philosophical Communication, Institute of Metaphysical Naturalism Foundation (located just down the road from the prestigious University of Wisconsin, Madison), I see no problem at all with this gentleman’s sign. In fact, I am now planning to get one for myself. It will look very nice on the Foundation’s screened-in porch, maybe next to the fairy statue where I put the geraniums.
I think we should all have our own Institutes, with appropriate titles. We’re Pharyngulites. We’re experts. We’ve earned them.
This could be fun.
Maybe this guy is a Lone Wolf Terrorist™. Just look at that garage, it’s unusually narrow for such a house. Also, those flowers seem to be dangling from a wire or something. Lastly, the bushes are trimmed too neatly. I think he’s trying to hide behind the facade of political correctness. More evidence that he’s up to no good.
PZ wrote:
Oh, that happens. Welcome to the world of Free Energy engineering, where the hype always seems to be an adequate substitution for an actual working model — as long as the absence of the free energy machine is attributed to the combined evil machinations of the Oil companies, the US government, and the Illuminati (who may, or may not, be shape-shifting lizards from outer space (that part is for the individual to decide for themselves.))
Sorry, but I had to watch the first part of Thrive last week, and will be watching the second half next week. I was the only person in the room who thought that violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics was a valid objection to a perpetual motion machine — even if you discount the unlikelihood that crop circles were made by UFOs to provide us with a code to understanding the secrets of the universe and free energy production. I am apparently naive and closed-minded: anything is possible.
And there can’t be a working prototype if the Bad Guys keep stealing it. Duh.
Creation science is like Free Energy. We’ve changed everything. Just you wait till THEY let our science out of the labs and into the world. Just you wait…
In fact it’s the original free energy, conjured out of the nothingness of a fictional deity.
Glen Davidson
According to the Maryland Veterinary Medical Association : http://www.mdvma.org/cgi/scripts/memberdirectory.cgi
David Abel graduated in 1972 and his American Board of Veterinary Practitioners (ABVP) specialty is Canine and Feline.
He uses the same email address (LIFE@US.NET) for his veterinary license as he does for his “scientific” publications.
Not sure how retired David Abel is because he appears as on the “Currently Registered Veterinarians in Maryland” from the state:
http://www.mda.state.md.us/vetboard/current_vets_10.pdf
Here’s the website where is is registred to be a veterinarian at:
http://www.wheatonanimalhospital.info/
well besides the fact that what he has written sounds like the kind of arguments that occur between theologians about their different natures of their god and their afterlife. Lots of big dense meaningless words talking about the stuff that only exists in between their ears.
I think there are tax reasons to incorporate as a separate organization. If I am not wrong it would be possible to shield all of your income from the tax man by doing so. To do so it may be necessary to actually produce something hence the self published papers of made up crap. Golly no good “christian” proponent and defender of “Gods truth” would be so low as to be involved in some kind of tax fraud would they?
uncle frogy
Veterinarian?
Interesting – seeing as how he bills himself as a “molecular biologist.”
Actually the car looks a lot like the mid-90’s Mercury Sable I had, which was a decent car for the 8 months I owned it, and in the time it was owned afterwards by my cousins. Mine was Seafoam green though. In my defence, the ad said “Blue”, and it was dirt cheap.
Ah, a Mercury Sable. I was close. But it can’t be the worst car ever. I once owned a Dodge Aspen wagon. I replaced every single component of the car in the course of a year that by the time I sold it to a junkyard for $500 it literally was not the same car – but it still didn’t work.
Damn, Sastra #38 beat me to it. I was going to suggest we could all have our own Institutes, though I like the idea of a Foundation slightly better. I guess the name is only restricted by the how much you want to spend on the sign – Sastra’s “Internet Information Division of the Department of Psychohumanistic Science and Philosophical Communication, Institute of Metaphysical Naturalism Foundation” would certainly be a costly shingle!
Centre for Calling Out Religious Arseholes?
Foundation for Intelligent Responses to “Intelligent” Design?
Institute of “Angry” Atheists?
Coincidentally enough, Batwoman’s “lair” is next door.
The Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. doesn’t sound quite right. It needs more quantum.
Institute for the study of theistic response
That’s a pretty nice sign. Far more official and professional than dr dr Dempski’s.
Cranks love to give themselves important sounding titles and membership in important sounding organisations. Last year Global up here had a report on their supperhour newscast about 11/11/11. One of the people they talked to was one Gordon Spowart of the Numerology Institute of Canada. When I looked up its website it became pretty obvious that Spowart was probably the only member of the “Institute.”
Check out his list of ‘peer reviewed publications’:
http://davidlabel.blogspot.com/
I shudder to think what peers did the reviewing.
It may be a good idea to contact the editorial boards of the “journals” where this stuff has been deposited. They may be interested in running retractions. Or at least, it’d be good if noise was made asking for them to do so…
Here’s the pages listing the members of the editorial boards (and contact info):
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/editors “Life” life@mdpi.com
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijms/editors “International Journal of Molecular Sciences” ijms@mdpi.com
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physics-of-life-reviews/editorial-board/ “Physics of Life Reviews” (editor-in-chief: Leonid I. Perlovsky ; http://leonid-perlovsky.com/ ; leonid@hrl.harvard.edu )
http://www.benthamscience.com/open/tocsj/EBM.htm “The Open Cybernetics & Systemics Journal” (contact: tocsj@benthamopen.org ; editor-in-chief: andrew.adamatzky@uwe.ac.uk )
http://www.tbiomed.com/about/edboard “Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling” (editor-in-chief: Paul Agutter ; http://theoretical-medicine-biology.co.uk ; only contact forms, not email addresses, found)
http://www.cellbiolint.org/cbi/cbiedboard.htm “Cell Biology International” (editor-in-chief: Denys N. Wheatley ; info@biomedes.co.uk (a medical journal editing company he runs — a somewhat odd choice of occupation for a medical researcher, but there we go)
http://www.bioscience.org “Frontiers in Bioscience” which has such an un-useable, typo-ridden website that I can’t even figure out who their Editorial Board is, or how to contact them.
Semiotica whose website (put up by their publisher) is broken, but which has a Wikipedia entry that says it was started in 1969…
Then there’s the “Journal of BioSemiotics” and “BioSemiotic Research Trends” both headed by the same guy, Marcello Barbieri ( http://www.biosemiotica.it ; brr@unife.it ). It’s somewhat confusing, as the name of the journal listed on the linked page is simply “BioSemiotics” and is published by Springer, not “Nova Publishers” as the other two seem to be (or have been)
http://www.washacadsci.org/journal/ “Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences” ; WAS@washacadsci.org
http://www.societyforchaostheory.org/conferences.html “Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences” (listed on his page as the “Society for Complexity [sic] in Psychology and the Life Sciences”) mkoopmans@aol.com
And there was something labeled “Washington Science 2006, Chandler, J.; Kay, P., Eds. Headquarters of the National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA 2006.” that I can’t even figure out how to look up.
And there’s this wiki-ish sort of thing from Elsevier (now inactive): http://www.scitopics.com/The_Genetic_Selection_GS_Principle.html ; the place to contact them about it seems to be here: http://www.hub.sciverse.com/action/contact
The (upcoming) book Abel repeatedly lists:
http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/evolutionary+%26+developmental+biology/book/978-94-007-2940-7 ; (Editor: Joseph Seckbach ; seckbach@huji.ac.il ; http://shum.huji.ac.il/~seckbach/ )
Another book from 2002, that is very difficult to find, but has an entry on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fundamentals-Life-Gyula-Palyi/dp/2842993039 (first author listed: Gyula Palyi ; palyi@unimo.it (maybe))
———–
Looking through that list, I may have turned over another rock: the “Theoretical Medicine and Biology Group” http://theoretical-medicine-biology.co.uk which “Paul Agutter” seems to be in charge of, gives it’s address as 26 Castle Hill, Glossop, Derbyshire, UK, SK13 7RR ; which from the Google Street View looks like a small private home.
———–
And yes, the amount of repeated entries on that page is simply astonishing. He seems to repeat the same ~ 15 citations 10 times over, under different subject headings.
All in all, it’s a mess of tiny little citations, all alike.
Shades of Kent Hovind’s Alma mater, “Patriot University“.
I agree with not knocking garages, I’ve seen a nice home biochem lab in a garage. Thermocycler and everything.
Mouse over the corner of the garage near the tree, where black and brown objects are on the ground. The word “oolfsfound” pops up. WTF?
I think subbie at #10 was on to something. I’d wager even money that this upstanding citizen of the US has declared his home some kind of church or facility so as to avoid taxes in some significant way. It is what they do.
Re: derwood’s comment
Yes, Goddard Space Flight Center is down the road in one direction and the University of Maryland is up the road in the opposite direction. Just goes to show that we have the same share of nutcases as any other region!
Should I send my debts, too? Or just the loose change hanging around at the bottom of the laundry hamper?
Early 1990s Mercury Sable. The upscale Taurus. (Truth in commenting: I now have my third (1995, 2000, 2008) Ford Taurus. I love them.
I hope it is just his thumbs he is twiddling, otherwise I’ll have to bleach my brain.
Does Greenbelt have a law forbidding commercial enterprises in residential areas? If so, does this “foundation” (ha!) qualify as a commercial enterprise?
His sham organization is listed as a tax-exempt non-profit for Prince Georges county:
http://www.taxexemptworld.com/organizations/prince-georges-county-md-maryland.asp?spg=9
So he’s using it to get a tax break.
Somebody start a “journal,” and I’ll write articles for it as a spokesman for my non-profit (what to call it… Texans for Reality–catchy!), to get a break on my taxes.
Shit–why didn’t I think of this sooner?
Aquaria
I don’t want to start a journal but I have some very nice parchment paper and I can print you a “certificate”.
Do you want a PhD in Underwater Left-handed Basket Weaving or an 11th dan in JeetKwonFu?
Juliet DeFarge, “oolfsfound” is the name of the image file for the second picture.
The beauty of having an inflated title for your non-profit garage is that your friends can all claim that it’s a proven scientific fact that the genetic code was designed by an intelligent superpower because, see! The Origin of Life Science Foundation says so.
I mean, would a Foundation lie to you?
–Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief
A lot of mapping programs just centre in on the middle of the block that contains the address.
At first I thought this would be fuel for their conspiratorial minds and it would be all over I’d blogs but I’m not sure this is something they’d want being public. Then again they could bill it as “this is all we need to debunk evo science”.
Heh, a $500 entry fee that is only returned to you if they reject your submission outright. If they accept it, give it their in-house (a quite literal description, it would appear) review and then decide it’s not good enough, you have no recourse. One of the required forms for entering the contest is a signed and notarized letter stating that you accept the the judges’ decisions are final and uncontestable.
Sounds like a way to try to make a million rather than award it.
1) Accept submission
2) Deny it being sufficient
3) ???
4) Profit