The Discovery Institute released a video of one of their stars, Ann Gauger, explaining the flaws in “population genetics” (I put it in quotes because it wasn’t a description of the field of population genetics that any competent biologist would recognize). Larry Moran points out the errors.
But then, someone noticed something else: the video was fake. It was Ann Gauger, all right, talking in a “lab”. Again, the quotes are because she was actually talking in front of a green screen, and a stock photo of a lab was spliced in behind her. Oops. It adds comic absurdity on top of the egregious errors in her babbling.
But of course that’s exactly what the DI wants. They can’t answer for the stupidity of her comments, but they can wave their hands and shout, “We do too have a lab! A real lab! And it’s sciencey and everything!” Because, after all, when you’re doing cargo cult science, the props are all important, and the substance doesn’t matter.
So, yeah, the indignant DI released a real photo of their real lab, with Gauger gazing at a petri dish. And here it is:
Errm, are we supposed to be impressed? I could give you an equivalent photo of a few shelves in one of our student labs — it would look similar, just messier. A petri dish, a few orange-top bottles, a small hood in the background—all they needed to make it really sciencey were a few bubbling bottles of colored water. D. James Kennedy did a better job in “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy”.
See? Now that’s a lab!
But seriously, the furniture does not make the lab — the work being done in it does. When you think it matters that you can pose with a petri dish, you really are doing cargo cult science.
I like that Kennedy’s lab has both a microscope and a telescope. I feel so…inadequate.
If they could pray at a sterile petri dish and produce intelligent life – or any life – I might be convinced.
Sadly I suspect Gauger didn’t even find intelligent life in the petri dish’s reflection.
Gosh, they have A lab for their ONE scientist. Color me whelmed.
OH.MY.LACK.OF.GOD!!!!!!!!
The IDiots have managed to make a positive contribution to science. Seriously. I am not kidding.
That photo reminded me I need to go down to the stores and get more Parafilm.
Well, it seems the sun shines on every dog’s arse some day!
Louis
Now that’s some good lulz.
And y’know, that ‘do too have a lab!’ picture, that’s got caption contest written all over it…
My entries…
‘Yeah… I dunno… I think this thing’s too big for the goal slots in the air hockey table.’
‘I just don’t get this stuff at all. Really not tasty. Makes no sense to serve it by itself in its own, special dish, either, but y’know foodies, gotta have the champagne flute, the red wine glass, the bread plate, so of course there’s a special dish for ‘petri’, too… Hey, maybe if they put it in a savoury soup? Tofu’s pretty okay that way, anyway.’
‘Look at me… I’m sciencing!’
Having both a microscope and a telescope is wretched excess. Really. It all depends on which end you look in, so all you need is one!
Tony,
One lab per scientist? That’s a luxury! Someone’s wasting money on their props methinks.
Louis
How dare they do any “materialistic science” at all?
They’ve whined piteously about how evil, wrong, and unfair it is, why do they even want to pretend to do it?
Glen Davidson
A J,
I look at that photo and I think:
DO YOU EVEN SCIENCE?
Louis
“Back off, man. I’m a scientist.”
From the way she’s looking at that petri dish she obviously needs a new rx for glasses. ” damn, I can’t read anything on this thing” I’ve seen that look before.
Here she is pipetting stuff at the same bench.
Its location is never revealed. (could be Harvard for all we know).
Scientists Develop the World’s First Chemistree
Nope, everybody knows all real labs have Jacob’s ladders in ’em. ESPECIALLY if you working in the so-called “Life Sciences”. How ya gonna make “life from non-life” without lots of electricity?
Xpost from PT:
Ann Gauger is another data point for my hypothesis.
She has a respectable scientific past. Degree from U. of Washington and a postdoc at Harvard.
These days she gets confused and mangles basic population genetics and systematics. Her scientific career consists of babbling in front of faked laboratory.
I work in a real analytical lab. Almost all solutions commonly used are colorless. That all of the solutions in the photo are green or blue or other colors is a dead giveaway.
“I’M in my “lab”, doin my “science”.
I actually clicked through to the evolutionnews site. I noticed a bunch of stuff about C.S. Lewis, a religious apologist. So I guess all that “ID is science and has nothing to do with religion” stuff is over.
I dunno… she does have sciency things about.
Are there any tubes? Do they have colored liquid in them? If she’s pouring colored liquid from one tube into the colored liquid in another tube, I might have to say she’s doing science.
Err, well, sometimes it’s hard to tell if things are small or really far away, so it pays to be prepared for both :-o
She has a degree in developmental biology.
So does Jonathan Wells.
I’m feeling bad for my discipline.
What kind of doctor of science would he be without?
Next time someone says that MDs are easily wooed by woo and only PhDs can be real scientists, I’m going to mention Ann Gauger.
Sadly, it appears that not even good training in science protects the brain against woo it really wants to believe.
As for the photo, if she’s doing something with sterile agar, it likely involves bacteria and she should be proving evolution in a couple of generations. At least I never could keep the damn things from evolving out from under me…antibiotic selection? Who needs a transgene to be abx resistant?
PZ, do you have tubes filled with colored liquids in your lab? Maybe that’ll help.
Maybe even a sciency looking thing with buttons.
I’m not a sciantist, but I worked in a laboratory once.
Show me a room and I will make it look like a loboratory for $50,000.
Just tell me what kind of lab you want: plausible or Doctor Frankenstein’s.
Shouldn’t that be “mythical” rather than “legendary”?
But the blue gloves! If that doesn’t just scream “caution – real science being done here”, I don’t know what does.
Either that, or they’re for a proctology exam.
I love their excuses:
Yes, yes, I’m sure filming in the DI “laboratory” would be distracting to the hoards of scientists working their, or the person who answers the DI’s phones in the same room. And it would be so distracting to viewers. Wait, to viewers?
Er, yeah, except Dawkins isn’t pretending he owns the Thames river and the London Eye, unlike DI who pretended to own and work in the lab in the stock photo.
The way she is posing with the petri dish is just so weird. This photo just hits you over the head with the message that she’s doing “research” in her “lab.” It’s just so forced. Most of the photos I see of scientists in their labs feature them just sitting there with their labmates, with no need to appear to be “sciencing.”
It’s a genuine photograph of a generic laboratory she’s standing in front of. And she’s wearing gloves when handling the petri dish. How more sciency can you get?
all your biology are belong to us…
@Jamie:
“We do real science! Look, here’s a scientist looking at a petri dish. Here’s another mixing colored liquids from various tubes! That one is pressing buttons on a sciencey-looking device. We’re sciencing as hard as we can!”
Her lab looks more than a bit like a examine room in a doctor’s office, doesn’t it?
DI-“Sciencing. We do it right!”
They do what they must
Because they can
Katherine Lorraine, Chaton de la Mort@24:
Just not the red button. Whatever you do, don’t push the red button.
@ raven (#15):
Another data point: Andy Schlafly, of Conservapedia infamy. Degree in electrical engineering, yet claims e = mc^2 is “liberal claptrap.”
I just did a Web Of Science (database of scientific publications) search on Gauger. She had something in New Scientist in 2007, along with Douglas Axe and Brendan Dixon titled “Good science will come.”
I looked up the reference, and it was a letter to the editor, not a research article.
That was 5 years ago, so I guess it’s a long time coming.
Hey I know where there is a very sciencey machine with lights and knobs and buttons and dials and a roll of old continuous computer paper coming out of it. It was built by a now-deceased geologist to measure thermoluminecense on prehistoric artifacts back when getting such a machine from the manufacturer cost mo bunch monies. It worked too.
True, it has been completely obsolete for more than 20 years and the lab keeps it around as a sort of memorial to that very much beloved old man and as a sort of sciencey decoration in the area we use as outreach for elementary school kids.
But they are very hard up for cash, and if the DI offered them enough for it, they might be tempted.
@fastlane:
This comic seems appropriate.
@otrame:
Ooh… That does sound very sciencey. You must share with us pictures of this sciencey device.
Long Time Coming
Crosby Stills & Nash
Katherine,
You remind me of a remark in some fan fiction: The one thing you can always count on in this life is that there will be fingerprints all over the button marked Do Not Touch.
@otrame:
I hate signs that say “do not touch.” I want to toooouch!! I want to know why they say not to touch them!!! But most of the time it’s boring. It’s like… wet paint or something.
Me @43
Which, now that I think of it, is a sign of both the idiocy and the genius of humankind.
@Katherine,
I’ll check out the website and see it a photo happens to catch it.
Atheists just want to spook the Designer. So damned hard to coax out to magic the DNA, too…
See, now you’ve disturbed it by forcing a photo of Gauger while trying to get it to do supernaturally stuff, and it’s going to disappear for another 2000 years. Your fault!
Glen Davidson
But in the petri dish is the next generation of Republicans.
It looks like the stock room for a fucking doctors office. seriously.
what does she think she’s doing with that petri dish? It didn’t come from the stock, there’s absolutely no reason for it to be anywhere near those shelves…
man, these people REALLY love lying. It’s pathetic.
…and their lab STILL doesn’t have the machine that goes *ping*.
I suspect blue gloves are necessary when you spend most of the time pulling ideas out of your arse
It’s the HISTORY ERASER BUTTON, you fool!
What? There’s no disco balls in the disco’ ‘tute labs?
there’s no need to feel bad.
THEY DON’T PUBLISH.
thus, they contribute nothing to the field at all, for good or ill.
the question is not about them having PhDs and thus somehow being a problem for any science field. The question is: WHY do we let these clowns get them in the first place? I knew Wells, and he WAS a clown. In the MVZ at Berkeley, the only reason we could figure that Molecular and Cell Biology even allowed him into the degree program to begin with was his Daddy Warbucks (Read: the now deceased, thankfully, Reverend Moon)
so the discussion of course shouldn’t be about their impacts on science, post degree, because they have none. The discussion should be about what to do when you discover a PhD candidate is deliberately lying to your department about wanting to do science to begin with.
Now, I can understand that there should be absolutely nothing to debate regarding an UNDERGRAD trying to game the system; we figure at least they might learn something. But that is not the purpose of graduate training.
that’s just it. She abandoned her scientific career for a career in marketing.
that’s all this is.
marketing.
and she gets paid for it, and feels good that somehow, in some twisted, heavily rationalized, way she’s also ‘spreading the gospel’, and fighting against ‘materialism’.
I agree with everything else though. It is very likely that extreme cognitive dissonance is what supports such heavy rationalization.
About the colored solutions in the “laboratory”: should not be more safe, in a real laboratory, if the solutions had diferent colors, to prevent acidents by mixing or using the wrong solution?
It is a honest question, maybe can be a stupid question for someone that work in a laboratory, but im no specialist in that kind of thing.
Listen, you guys can fun of them and their lab all you want but she must be a scientist; she has a lab coat and rubber gloves! They don’t just give that shit away.
(I work in a medical clinic and I could come close to reproducing that photo with about 5 minutes of effort.)
Shouldn’t there be a blackboard covered with equations and random biology terms?
Heh. Re the doctor’s office/hospital supply room vibe, I think I’ve been in actual examining rooms looked a lot like that…
Soooo… Appending to my entries:
‘Well then, good news! It’s a suppository!’
It has no cake.
Don’t they know you can’t do science without cake ?
Sure, go ahead and laugh.
Ed Wood would have killed to get such a fantastic lab in one of his films.
Two by two, hands of blue, two by two, hands of blue, two by two, hands of blue, two by two, hands of blue…
Microscope AND telescope in a single lab. Hah! I have both a microwave and telephone in mine.
Yeah, right.
In the original vid, the speaker was well off-center, and the lab was centered in the frame—they were emphasizing the lab.Oddly, she wasn’t wearing a lab coat in the vid, but a very nice scarf—what was that about?
In the “real” lab they show in the photo, there isn’t enough room for more than a second person, so their original excuse about not disturbing the other workers goes right out the window. I’ve run a water-quality lab that was bigger than that, and it could only usefully accommodate two people—it had a stockroom that was more like the photo.
Seriously, they couldn’t stop lab work long enough to film a vid, nor find any time when the lab wasn’t busy? Hint: The stock photo was labelled “lab at night”.
I have examined many a petri dish, and have never held one up like that to do so. Possibly there is some issue with distance vision, there, but the light just isn’t at any useful angle.
They’ve done something wrong, then tried to cover it up, then blown the coverup. Now, of course, they are claiming that the whole fuss is because nobody can touch their science.
I have a machine that goes “bing”!
Looks like their fancy lab isn’t doing them much good, because a Louisiana parish just banned Cretinism from public schools!
I just retired a couple months ago, from 40 years in the lab. Her pic looks sort of realistic to me. A low cost PCR hood in the background, various protocols and recipes taped to the shelves. The Petri dish with E. coli, the blue nitrile gloves. All standard fair in a basic lab. What’s counts though is what you do with these materials and WHAT YOU PUBLISH in peer reviewed journals. She has the look but not the pubs.
That telescope, I think Toyworld have them for $16.99. The only thing you can do with them is spy in your neighbour’s bedroom. That’s proper creation science you know, observing how other people mange the ass-pulling techniques without getting their hands dirty. The first product developed from this branch of science was blue plastic gloves.
Here in TN, they have taken steps though new legislation to allow creationism back into the classroom. This law turns the clock back nearly 100 years here in the seemingly unprogressive South and is simply embarrassing. There is no argument against the Theory of Evolution other than that of religious doctrine. The Monkey Law only opens the door for fanatic Christianity to creep its way back into our classrooms. You can see my visual response as a Tennessean to this absurd law on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/04/pulpit-in-classroom-biblical-agenda-in.html with some evolutionary art and a little bit of simple logic.
Photo caption:
Behold, the Designer!
That last photo is suspicious. No lab doing actual biology is that clean unless its a BSL-3 or 4 facility.
My question is why is someone looking at a petri dish without at least a HEPA dust mask on to prevent inhalation/contamination?
The explanation for both a telescope and microscope in the lab is rather simple: telescopes are for observing macroevolution while microscopes are for observing microevolution. Duh!
Because the petri dish is empty. Just came out of the envelope in which Amazon delivered it.
About those blue gloves. In my experience those are nitrile rather than latex. Do you really need those in biology? Chemists use them because they’re a tad more resistant to organics, but that’s about it.
The blue gloves are probably powder free nitrile gloves. Many labs have them to avoid the problem with employees who are alergic to latex or the powder.
Beaker is missing in the lower photo?
That really wasn’t meant to be a question.
No Dr. Honeydew, either.
I tend to use thicker green nitrile gloves as the thin blue nitrile as shown are prone to solvent leakage. My two cents.
I’m trying to imagine a laboratory that could properly investigate the well-formulated theory that an unobserved intelligence, through means that we don’t understand, at an unknown time and place, did something (we don’t know what), for a reason (that we can’t guess), that resulted in our existence. These people seem woefully under-equipped.
Maybe if the DI people put together a list of the equipment they need, along with an explanation of what the equipment would be used for, we could properly allocate the necessary resources. Perhaps a network of orbital particle accelerators to sweep for cloaked spaceships? Ground-penetrating radar to search for hidden, 4 billion year old genetic engineering facilities far below the surface of the earth? A handheld deity detector? Just tell us what you need. We must support the scientificish community.
My point was surprise that biologists use organic solvents.
Wait. Really? How can those goobers not understand how the Internet works? A little effort to make their own fake lab background, and they’d never have been caught. But a stock photo? Not one of them knows about Google image search? Morons.
I’ll bet she sees the image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in that petri dish!
Chas @12:
Not only at the same location; the two photos were almost certainly taken at the same time. Purely staged publicity shots — “using a pipette”, “staring at a petri dish”… I bet there’s a “looking into a microscope” shot to complete the set.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with having staged publicity photos… provided there’s also some evidence of you actually doing the work you’re portrayed as doing.
From the article:
Do they understand why it’s a convention though?
It’s a visual shorthand to say to the viewer, “this person is in London“. Drop some clearly identifiable regional landmarks behind the subject to remind you that they’re not in the same room as the interviewer, but they’re doing it via satellite. It’s not intended to represent the literal truth of a view over the subject’s shoulder, but it conveys useful information.
“I am giving this interview from London.”
“I am reporting from the nation’s capital.”
What is a fake lab backdrop intended to convey?
“I am in a lab.”
(No. You are in a studio.)
“I am a real scientist doing real science.”
(This is undermined by being a photo of somebody else’s lab, rather than your own.)
What does it actually convey?
“I am trying hard to look like I do science without having to back it up.”
As anyone taken stock pictures in a lab? Trust me, they all either feature the most expensive equipment (all the way down to the UV-VIS) or are candid shots of people doing things they shouldn’t be in a lab (such as sleeping in a hood). If their most important piece of equipment is that petri dish or the micropipette in the other picture I’m going to have to doubt the existence of their “lab”. Most breweries/wineries have better stocked labs than this picture indicates.
most productive lab I ever worked in:
was nothing but a bunch of writing tables with comfy chairs, and a lab bench with a PCR machine sitting on it.
samples go in, data comes out.
you CAN’T EXPLAIN THAT!
;)
what I learned from the Dishonesty Institute:
Casey Luskin (isn’t he a lawyer?) spent time work at the Scripps Instituteion
Now I just need to know what the fuck an Instituteion is.
cue obvious answer:
an Instituteion is where CDesign Propenentists go do do their research, of course.
That petri dish looks rather familiar….
Linky.
They can’t be doing real science. I don’t see the machine that goes “bing!”.
Um… don’t be surprised. Plenty of organic solvents are used (for example) in tissue processing for microscopy, or extractions for assays ;)
I use 95% ethanol, 99% isopropanol, Triton X-100, acetone, methanol, and ether all of the time in my lab. Also, about the no mask thing, if that’s an E. coli plate, I’m not surprised she’s not wearing one. I don’t, and neither does any other molecular biologist I know. And we have a real population geneticist at my institution. None of the issues with the equipment matter though, because cargo cult science doesn’t require perfection. It just has to look like science is being done.
But in a real lab, those papers taped to the shelving would be water damaged, and the tape would not be the same color on every one of them.
When I ran a water-quality lab, I grew bacteria cultures in petri dishes. I never wore a mask. I do not remember all the solvents, but we used alcohol for sterilization, and I got to take home an old carboy of acetic acid (I diluted it to vinegar and used it for cleaning). The lab I see her in looks a lot like that little lab, not a high-powered research laboratory.
Whatever the “Tute is doing, it isn’t serious.Their “Biologic” is bilge.
I say again, look at the video, and see where she is in the screen. The center of her face is centered in the left half of the screen—one-fourth of the way in. Hardly any of her reaches the center of the screen. There is a rule of thirds, that might excuse having her off-center, but not that far. The fake lab predominates in the shot, and the real lab is a joke.
#77 Ogvorbis: useless
I heard they were offered quite a bit of money to do the promo for the DI but turned it down on principle.
I can sort of see what you mean, but it’s not a common practice (at least in the UK, and from what I’ve seen as a student). I guess it could work, but only in those situations where colourants wouldn’t interfere with the work (dyes can be reactive too), and everyone can see and understand the colour differences (colourblindness, lab visitors and so on could limit such a system’s usefulness).