Doesn’t that put you in a romantic mood?
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Doesn’t that put you in a romantic mood?
I’ve been overestimating creationists. Every time I look at what they’re saying about evolution, my estimation drops yet further … you’d think that after years of tracking this stuff, they’d bottom out, but no. The latest examples are some snippets from a presentation by Caroline Crocker. Crocker is one of the martyrs of ID — she was released from a temporary teaching position at George Mason University, and claims it was because she is a creationist, when the real explanation is that she’s an incompetent kook.
Her powerpoint slides have to be seen to be believed. Here’s one example. Can you spot the egregious errors?
James Randerson scrapes a little more info on the Han and Warda paper. The editor, Michael Dunn, sounds uncommunicative, but I can’t blame him for wanting to proceed cautiously…I just hope that eventually we get a better accounting.
The interesting revelation is a letter from one of the authors, Warda. I think we’ve found the source of the weird fantasies in the text.
The problem is that we described in very clear and definite way the disciplined nature that takes part inside our cells. We supported our meaning with define proteomics evidences that cry in front of scientists that the mitochondria is not evolved from other prokaryotes. They want to destroy us because we say the truth; only the truth.
Yes, the paper does describe the complexity in mitochondria. However, the paper does not back up their claim to have “disproven” the endosymbiotic hypothesis for the origin of mitochondria at all, nor does it provide any evidence for an alternative…and postulating a “mighty creator” is not a scientific alternative hypothesis. Complexity is not an argument against evolution!
Nobody was interested in destroying them. They wrote some foolish things in a science paper that were completely unwarranted, and people are discussing the sloppy and inappropriate content. There is no fatwa here.
He also denies plagiarizing anything. Sorry, guy, the evidence is there, and stonewalling is not a credible option right now. It just makes me want to reject everything you say, since the smoking gun is right there in your hand, where everyone can see it.
Mr Warda revealed his agenda yet further in comments to the the Times Higher Education supplement:
Co-author Mr Warda told Times Higher Education that to criticise Western science was “taboo”. He said: “It is clear that the fingerprint of (the) mighty creator (is) inside everyone in this Universe.”
After initially claiming that evolution was a “useless, evidence-less” theory, he said the process did take place, but under the control of “complete, disciplined wisdom” and not in a chaotic way. “Even one amino acid, when mutated in any of millions of tiny different cell receptors in their body, can kill or ruin life,” he added. “Is this chaos?”
So I think we can now safely say how the goofiness got into the paper: one of the authors simply and unashamedly put it there. Now the puzzle is to figure out how such blatant garbage got past peer review.
The gang of prevaricators behind Ben Stein’s Expelled movie had their own way of celebrating Darwin Day: they wrote a blog post that was a solid wall of lies and nonsense. In a way, I’m impressed; I’d have to really struggle to write something that was such a dense array of concentrated stupid, but for them, it seems to be a natural talent, allowing them to blithely and effortlessly rattle off a succession of falsehoods without blushing.
Let’s begin with the beginning. You don’t even have to be a biologist to be embarrassed by these wankers.
Now Shubin is on the Mindcast — have a listen.
The Danish cartoonists vs. Muslims conflict is flaring up again, with the discovery of a conspiracy by Muslims to kill a cartoonist. There are many levels of irony here; it’s simply stupid to try and protest accusations that you are violent by committing acts of violence. I’ve also noticed an interesting pattern of escalation.
The aggrieved Muslims are saying, “Mock our god and we will kill you.” They have the goal of suppressing images they consider blasphemous.
The cartoonists are saying, “Threaten to kill us and we will mock your god.” Obviously, they’d like to stay alive, but their goal in this context is to see their work disseminated widely.
Now ask yourself, who is achieving their goals? Who is winning?
It looks to me like a few relatively obscure cartoonists are crushing the fundamentalist Muslim world. Those cartoons aren’t even that good, and they’re being published everywhere, even appearing on blogs.
Now maybe I’m misinterpreting the fundie Muslim position here: maybe their goal is actually to make sure the world thinks their beliefs are dangerous and stupid, and also ineffectual; they’re flailing pointlessly to suppress a couple of scribblings that would have vanished into obscurity, and have managed to turn them into icons of Islamic insanity. They’re doing a good job if that’s so. They’ve convinced me, at any rate.
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I’m busy, and I don’t want to deal with a nause-inducing interview with Casey Luskin, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Mark Mathis. Somebody else yak up over it, and let me link to it.
I’m still shying away from listening to this abomination, so get with it and tell me what’s on it. First up: Jyunri Kankei.
The Warda and Han paper has been officially retracted, and the editor has made an official statement, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
The paper has drawn a blizzard of criticism in the blogosphere about the peer-review process at the journal, Proteomics. The editor of the journal, Michael J. Dunn, a professor at University College Dublin’s Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, told The Chronicle last week that the paper had passed peer review.
Today’s announcement says that the two authors of the article, who are scientists at Inje University, in South Korea, agreed to the retraction. Initially only one of the authors had asked for a retraction.
In the news announcement, Mr. Dunn said: “Clearly human error has caused a misstep in the normally rigorous peer review that is standard practice for Proteomics and should prevent such issues arising.”
The plagiarism is bad all right, but my main concern was that such a blatantly goofy paper made it through peer review. How? All Dunn is saying is that it did pass review, which suggests that somehow, someone read it and didn’t pull the alarm, and even approved it. Was it a lazy reviewer? Or was it some other kind of hole in the process? “Human error” is an awfully vague label.
We may not ever get an answer, but you know everyone will be scrutinizing Proteomics papers critically. Other journals, too, of course — a reader just sent me another freaky paper that I’ll describe tomorrow.
You need a website that chronicles instances of giant Jeeebi. These aren’t mere graven images, these are graven mega-images of apocalyptic proportions, which really ought to bring down the wrath of the Lord already.
