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'55 Science Paper Retracted to Thwart Creationists
i_like_spam writes "The New York Times has up a story about a paper published in 1955 by Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College. The paper, entitled 'Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life', speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in the Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, 'one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.' Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, but today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want — from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention. So after 52 years, he has retracted the paper. 'Dr. Jacobson's retraction is in "the noblest tradition of science," Rosalind Reid, editor of American Scientist, wrote in its November-December issue, which has Dr. Jacobson's letter. His letter shows, Ms. Reid wrote, "the distinction between a scientist who cannot let error stand, no matter the embarrassment of public correction," and people who "cling to dogma."'"
If you RTFA, you would see that he reread his paper and found many errors that no one else had found yet. He retracted the paper because of the errors. Of course he might have other motives but that is anybody's guess
The nature of the citations made him re-read it, and realize he'd made factual errors. Those errors were being used to support the arguments of the people citing the paper. So he retracted it to remove those errors from circulation.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Where in the bible does it state that the earth is 6000 years old? Can you please quote this?
This site should provide you with the answer to your question. In particular, this document lays out the argument quite nicely.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Here's the top ranked page for me:
http://www.albatrus.org/english/theology/creation/biblical_age_earth.htm
which uses the following passages for reference:
It seems like most of the dates are not explicitly mentioned, but they can be grafted onto a skeleton of known historical events (such as the fall of Jerusalem)
[I haven't actually checked these out myself....]
Ask me about repetitive DNA
The New York Times is wrong again. He did not retract the entire paper. He retracted "two brief passages". Besides, there is recent evidence that water existed early in the Earth's formation so his assumptions about the Hadean environment might be obsolete.
Read the article: Their citing it made him rexamine it, and spot factual errors he hadn't caught 52 years ago.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Because, if you RTFA, you'll see he found errors in his paper. It just so happens those incorrect assertions are being used by creationists as validation of their beliefs.
Developers: We can use your help.
A couple of theologians named Ussher and Lightfoot (not Gordon) ran the numbers between Adam and a known historical event (the Babylonian exile), using all the "This dipshit begat that dipshit" lines and arrived at an approximation of 6000 years (October 23, 4004 B.C. to be exact). A similar timeline had been roughly accepted long before either theologian, but they "locked it down."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And then you notice this scientist _retracted_ his paper, thus admitting he made a mistake. Perfection, anyone?
It won't be retracted 'when you change your minds'.
It gets retracted when either an error is discovered in it, or new evidence is discovered which contradicts it.
This is the way science works. It is based on evidence, not beliefs.
The original retraction letter is inspiring. I am glad that Dr. Jacobson set the record straight, even though it would have been easier for him to ignore his earlier mistakes.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
Actually, every person who believes in a creation story really is basing this belief solely on dogma. There is absolutely no evidence supporting any of the supernatural claims in any of the genesis myths of any of the worlds' religions. None.
Scientists believe knowledge comes from evidence and the logical conclusions derivable from that evidence.
Religious people believe knowledge comes from "faith" (aka "it is written"), which is the polar opposite of evidence.
The so called "moderate" religious people exist in a state of mind called "cognitive dissonance" whereby all knowledge is derived from evidence and logic EXCEPT knowledge pertaining to topics they have been indoctrinated from birth to accept due to faith. This is your textbook dogma.
Don't take a textbook definition of dogma and call it anything else. That's really disingenuous of you.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
"The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith."
I believe that this a good thing, a lot of people dislike uncertainty, however.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
"6000 years" is an interpretation of the years of Adam's descendants. The bible says people pre-existed Adam.
The only way to make your statement "work" is to stubbornly fail to acknowledge any other possible meaning of "day" (of the "seven") in a highly-allegorical book.
I held my comment the last 20 times this exact same lame joke was modded +5 Funny, but this time I'll comment.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: October 25, 2007
In January 1955, Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, published a paper called "Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life" in American Scientist, the journal of Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society.
In it, Dr. Jacobson speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, "one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive."
Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. But today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want -- from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention.
So after 52 years, he has retracted it.
The retraction came about when, on a whim, Dr. Jacobson ran a search for his name on Google. At age 84 and after 20 years of retirement, "I wanted to see, what have I done in all these many years?" he said. "It was vanity. What can I tell you?"
He found many entries relating to his work on compounds called polymers; on information theory, a branch of mathematics involving statistics and probability; and other subjects. But others were for creationist sites that have taken up his 1955 paper as scientific support for their views.
Darwinismrefuted.com, for example, says Dr. Jacobson's paper "undermines the scenario that life could have come about by accident." Another creationist site, Evolution-facts.org, says his findings mean that "within a few minutes, all the various parts of the living organism had to make themselves out of sloshing water," an impossible feat without a supernatural hand.
"Ouch," Dr. Jacobson said. "It was hideous."
That is not because he objects to religion, he said. Though he was raised in a secular household, he said, "Religion is O.K. as long as you don't fly in the face of facts." After all, he said, no one can disprove the existence of God. But Dr. Jacobson said he was dismayed to think that people might use his work in what he called "malignant" denunciations of Darwin.
Things grew worse when he reread his paper, he said, because he discovered errors. One related to what he called a "conjecture" about whether amino acids, the basic building blocks of protein and a crucial component of living things, could form naturally.
"Under the circumstances I mention, just a bunch of chemicals sitting together, no," he said. "Because it takes energy to go from the things that make glycine to glycine, glycine being the simplest amino acid."
There were potential sources of energy, he said. So to say that nothing much would happen in its absence "is totally beside the point." "And that is a point I did not make," he added.
Another assertion in the paper, about what would have had to occur simultaneously for living matter to arise, is just plain wrong, he said, adding, "It was a dumb mistake, but nobody ever caught me on it."
Vance Ferrell, who said he put together the material posted on Evolution-facts.org, said if the paper had been retracted he would remove the reference to it. Mr. Ferrell said he had no way of knowing what motivated Dr. Jacobson, but said that if scientists "look like they are pro-creationist they can get into trouble."
"There is an embarrassment," Mr. Ferrell said.
Dr. Jacobson conceded that was the case. He wrote in his retraction letter, "I am deeply embarrassed to have been the originator of such misstatements."
It is not unusual for scientists to publish papers and, if they discover evidence that challenges them, to announce they were wrong. The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith.
So Dr. Jacobson's retraction is in "the noblest tradition of science," Rosalind Reid, editor of American Scientist
If somewhat tardy? If you'd been a scientist as long as this guy has, I'd be willing to bet that you'd have quite a few papers in the academic wilds. You probably won't bother to go back and periodically read everything you've ever written, looking for errors.
He didn't retract the paper for either reason alone. Creationists quoted his paper, prompting the guy to re-read the paper he wrote a long time ago. In so doing, he found errors. Retraction followed.
Absent either event (quote by creationists) or (found errors) no retraction gets made.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
It wasn't religion that stumbled Einstein (he wasn't religious in any meaningful sense of the word), but it was his sense of aesthetic. He was the last of the Classical Physicists, and in that tradition, he wanted a clockwork universe, and not one that did funky things like expand from some singularity where mathematics broke down, nor did he want one that was at some subatomic level was a chaotic bubbling brew where the arrow of time and causality lost their meaning.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
read: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/56234;jsessionid=aaah7j1zW7KfWl
The relevant portion:
I ask you to honor my request to retract two brief passages, as follows:
On page 121: "Directions for the reproduction of plans, for energy and the extraction of parts from the current environment, for the growth sequence, and for the effector mechanisms translating instructions into growth--all had to be simultaneously present at that moment [of life's birth]."
On page 125: "From the probability standpoint, the ordering of the present environment into a single amino acid molecule would be utterly improbable in all the time and space available for the origin of terrestrial life."
That is all, he is not retracting his entire article. It is impossible to tell this from the headline link, however; said headline presents the story as the scientist retracting his entire paper. Which is wrong, unless my reading comprehension is absolutely nonexistent today, but I don't think that's the case.
"I don't have a problem with the scientific method. However Evolution isn't PART of the scientific method, because it hasn't predicted ANYTHING."
Evolution has made thousands of correct predictions, that for example, life evolves and fans out in slow, gradual steps, and the fossil record unearthed since the time of Darwin and the discovery of DNA as the agent of inheritance backs this up, without a doubt. Also, new structures evolve slowly from old structures, such as the bones of the ear. Did you know the same light-sensitive compounds that power the eye of a jellyfish are also present in your eye? And the striking similarities in the embryonic development of genetically related species (and even not-so-closely related ones). And that humans have one less chromosome than our ape ancestors, which was recently found to happen because two chromosomes merged into during the development of homo sapiens. Evolution predicts and fits with all of our current knowledge about life on earth, even if it manages to offend your religious sensibilities. Anyone who doesn't believe this has not looked honestly at the current scientific evidence, for example as laid out here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
I have to object to your assertion that theories of evolution (I intentionally use the plural, as many details of its progress and operation are still open areas of research) do not yield testable predictions. In fact, many observations of the natural world in myriad fields of study -- all subsequent to the formulation of evolution -- have been in accord with its predictions. I give an excerpt from a longer post of mine made at The Bonehead Compendium:
The full post and the exchange prompting it are available here. I wish I could revise it, as I fired it off pretty quickly and now lament the quality of the writing. I still stand by the argument and the evidence.
If you're in science, it's basically your opinion that scientific theories are only useful if they're predictive. If you don't buy that, you're not in science.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
First, notice the way you had to qualify your definition, i.e. "belief without proof". You recognize that the word "belief", anyway, just indicates that you accept something to be true. It doesn't say anything about the justification for your belief, only that you have the belief. Well, in our translations of the Bible, "believe" and "faith" are both used to translate the same root word, in verb or noun form (pistis, pistia, etc.).
The actual meaning of "faith" is complex. It has more than one sense, both in the Biblical languages and in English. It can mean fidelity, loyalty, faithfulness. "I made the promise in good faith." "He has been a faithful companion." It can mean conviction of the truth of something. It can mean trust in something, or reliance on it. There's an interesting verse in Paul's letter to the Roman church, with three different uses: disbelieve, unbelief, and faithfulness--where the third use is referring to God's own "faith". That's right, God is said to have faith--and in that case it obviously has nothing to do with a blind leap. (Here's the verse, if you're curious, along with the language resources.)
An illustration. Most people will say that Christian faith is more than simple intellectual assent; it involves a trust component. Trust? Aren't I talking about blind faith now? No, not necessarily. As I said above, there's a sense of trusting in something, relying on it. I would compare it to trusting in the skill of a pilot and the construction of an airplane to take you safely where you're going. Your trust might be blind--perhaps if you're from an isolated tribal culture with no familiarity with modern technology. Or it might be extremely well-founded, based on a familiarity with the engineering of the manufacturer and the maintenance procedures of the airline and the training & experience of the pilot. Or it might be slightly less researched--maybe you just know that the airline has a good track-record, and so you just trust in all the rest. In other words, your faith can have different levels of warrant. And the more research you've done, the stronger your faith will be.
And that is precisely how I view Christian faith--made stronger by better evidence. I trust in the promises of God and the work of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. I judge them to be trustworthy, and I judge myself to have good enough reason to exercise that trust.
If you want to read a defense of the idea that the Bible does not ask for a blind leap, but trust in a reliable source, you can check out this essay by Greg Koukl. (He makes a good positive case, though it's not exhaustive.)
Hey, neat. You put that there to illustrate the 'bias' point? In the UK, Australia, and maybe some countries that were colonies of the UK until recently it's Maths for Mathematics. Nice, no?
whoa whoa whoa... careful. The fundies love to jump on that one. Fossils can't be dated with C14. We have other methods to do that.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
It's pronounced 'math' in North America. In the UK it has always been pronounced 'maths'. I'm not sure about the convention in Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. If you hear 'maths' you are probably talking to a Brit and your pronunciation 'math' will sound odd to him too.
If this is incorrect, I retract the above statement before it is misused in a 'my English is better than yours' debate. In the interests of good science of course...
Darwinism explains everything we know about the animal kingdom. There are no "missing links", just animals missing from the fossil record (which doesn't contain all the animals that have ever existed, as creating a fossil requires a lot of luck in itself). We can see, just from our DNA, that we are related to the other apes - that we have common ancestors. We have observed evolution in laboratories. What are these evolutionary leaps you talk about that you claim disprove Darwinian evolution? I'd be very interested to hear :)
I did read some of the links you provided, but as it's argument is fatally-flawed from the very outset, reading any more would have been a waste of time.
Of course if you look at the fossil record, it makes no sense. The fossil record is not a record of every species that has ever existed. As I said earlier, to make a fossil takes a lot of luck. It doesn't disprove or even threaten evolution.
You missed a better one. The first verse of Hebrews 11 would make a stronger case: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
I pointed you to an essay for a "positive" Biblical case for my view. That is, it points out that knowledge based on good evidence is a major theme in the Gospels and letters of the New Testament. I also said it wasn't exhaustive. I meant that it doesn't deal with criticisms. Specifically, I had in mind that it doesn't address Hebrews 11:1 and Jesus' words to Thomas. I don't think it's at all hard to see why they do not contradict my view, but that essay didn't go through those issues.
Here's the problem: Did you actually read John 20:29? What does it say? That Thomas saw, and believed. Thomas believed. Notice that. He believed. Look at it again. Did Jesus say that his faith wasn't real faith because he wanted justification? No! Did he criticize Thomas? Well...Maybe. Not directly. He praised others who had been willing to believe without seeing him directly. That's either indirect criticism of Thomas' skepticism (as people usually assume), or it's praise for people willing to believe without the level of proof Thomas had. But neither means that faith must be blind.
Jesus' point may have been that it will be harder for people to believe who don't get to see the resurrected body, so they deserve praise. But if he was criticizing Thomas, I'd say it was because his skepticism was not reasonable. It bordered on paranoia. John 20:29 doesn't happen in a vacuum, and it wasn't addressed to you. It was addressed to Thomas, after 20 chapters of Jesus demonstrating divine power, walking on water, raising a dead man, then predicting his own death and resurrection. (I don't care if you don't believe it happened. We're talking about the meaning of the events and the claims. We're defining the Biblical worldview, not talking about whether it's true. You're free to disbelieve, but you're not free to redefine what they said and meant.) After what Thomas had seen, his insistence to see and feel Jesus' hands and side was not reasoned caution, it was a bitter spirit of forgetfulness and disbelief.
As I said, Hebrews 11:1 is stronger--if you read it as a sentence in a vacuum. But keep reading the rest of the chapter. It's often called the "faith hall of fame"--it lists a bunch of Old Testament people who showed great faith. And in many (most?) of those examples, the faith for which they are being praised was exhibited after they had spoken directly with God or seen demonstrations of divine power. Their belief was warranted, and the fact that they had seen proof of God did not make "faith" an empty thing. If you read 11:13, it's more clear. "These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar". They had faith that God would deliver on his promises, even though they died before seeing those promises fulfilled. That's the context. The context does not bear out the idea that 11:1 means faith is only faith if it's blind.
On the basis of these observations, I'm rather confident that the Bible does not ask for blind faith. You may not believe that the evidence is good, but that doesn't mean the Bible is asking for belief without warrant.