Slashdot Mirror
'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."'"
When will creationists realize that you can't prove divine intervention any more than you can prove flying purple unicorns? Why can't they just stick to a doctrine of faith and belief?
"The creationist zealots will likely take this bit of news, and embrace it as evidence that the scientific community is trying to be deceitful by withdrawing a "clearly correct" paper, for political reasons."
Sounds like this guy has already done what you're proposing they'll do:
"Vance Ferrell, who said he put together the material posted on Evolution-facts.org, said if the paper had been retracted he would remove the reference to it.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.""
Seems no matter what logical steps one takes to bring the truth to light, there will be someone else turning it around for their own interests.
The really pathetic thing is that, if I read the article correctly, the creationists aren't even interpreting his findings correctly. He basically says that as the earth started to cool, chemical compounds could arise that would remain stable in the environment, and that it would take some source of energy to assemble them into something more complex. In contrast, one creationist web site mentioned by the article describes the paper as meaning that "within a few minutes, all the various parts of the living organism had to make themselves out of sloshing water." Nothing like a little creative misinterpretation to give your dogmatic nonsense the air of scientific legitimacy.
Where is your own opinion here coming from? Do you have the knowledge & understanding of the facts of the situation to know that such a slant would be wrong? Or does it just fit your own nice package of preconceived notions?
In the 1960s, tectonic plate theory was poo-pooed as being bulshit. The PhDs of the day would ridicule tectonics and instead forwrd their own highly implausable theories. These same learned people later withdrew their claims as anti-tectonic claims became unsustainable..
Folks, science advances and so does knowledge. Material, particularly that based on opinion rather than experiment, is subject to change.
Anyone that relies on old theories may as well sign up as life members of the flat earth society.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
>>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. Not necessarily. Blanket statements like this are stupid. Sure, some people refuse to allow their faiths to be challenged, but most of my experience with people of faith has been the opposite. Faith is more like an axiom than blindness--it is believed because with it as a foundation, the rest of the world makes sense, even though there may not be a positive proof for it to stand on. All science is based on axioms as well, which aren't supported either, that's why they're called axioms. Both scientists and people of faith have a hard time when someone questions their axioms. But I see no evidence to show that people of faith are less likely to accept a challenge of their axioms: in fact, they are more likely to accept that challenge, and if truly presented with something that can prove it's falsity, I would say a person of faith is much more likely to overturn that belief than a mathematician would be to overturn one of Euler's axioms.
So it's more correct to say the timeline they developed is from the creation of Adam and Eve than anything else. If you choose to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, add a week, but keep in mind the raw materials were there before the creation process started.
Go ahead, take the 5 minutes required to read the creation story, and another 15 minutes to analyse it (not a stretch for people who've spent 30 years analysing Star Wars), you will find strong evidence in the wording that (submerged) earth, water, and air were all there in the first place.
P.S. Most of my irritation isn't directed at you, but at the others who blindly assert their opinions without any citation or analysis and no facts to back it up, in keeping with the best dogmatists. Yours was the comment that was most relevant to what I wanted to point out.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Looks like you already did.
'Changing your mind' from your first post is usually alluding to things like 'I think I'll have the spaghetti instead of the salad'. It's something anyone can do on a whim.
He discovered a factual error in a work he had done, which leads to different conclusions. That's an entirely different thing.
The guy wrote something that he believed in '55 but doesn't believe today.
He knows there is now evidence showing what he thought in '55 was incorrect. He bases his understanding on the accumulated evidence of science, which has extended quite a bit since '55.
The beliefs of established science evolve. And they are beliefs.
Unlike religion, scientific believes can change when new evidence shows old ones were wrong. Religion doesn't change no matter how much evidence there is showing it's wrong.
Fact's don't change with time.
No, but new facts are constantly being discovered which extend and refine our knowledge of the universe. We cannot have final 'beliefs' on how everything in the universe works because we are still learning about it. But in each pass we get closer and closer to fundamental truths. Religion stays where it's always been.
You may want to study the history of the controversy between creationism and evolution before saying something like "there weren't creationists around" in 1955. When Charles Darwin published "The Origin of Species" in 1859, it was controversial. There was controversy in 1925 when John Scopes went on trial for teaching the principles of evolutionary theory in a public school. He lost, by the way, and the Act under which he was charged was not repealed until 1967.
What you are describing is "compartmentalization", or, as it is called in memory of Lewis Caroll, the White Queen Hypothesis, as in:
Alice: "One CAN'T believe impossible things."
White Queen: "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for a half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
So, on the one hand, a Creationist will happily accept radioactive decay and the notion that radioactive isotopes have half-lives, and even understand what that basically means, but then turn around and reject that as evidence for an old Earth. There objections to radioactive decay in particular fall into three basic camps:
1. Radioactive decay happened faster in the past - This, of course, is ludicrous, and it should be pointed out to them that tinkering with decay rights to make isotopes decay faster would release so much energy that they would basically melt the planet.
2. Radioactive isotopes were created at various states of decay - This is the omphalism argument (related to the famous Light Was Created In Transit argument). There's no way to falsify that, which pretty much defeats at as a empirically meaningful statement (translation: even if it's true, science would have to ignore it as a possibility).
3. You Weren't There So How Would You Know - This is actually a pretty common claim by Young Earth Creationists, though, as it relates to the White Queen Hypothesis, it's difficult to say how invoking epistemological nihilism helps there own claims any better than a scientific one. Generally, they aren't sufficiently aware of the logical trap involved in invoking it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
> Our documentation is far older than anything they have
Ahem, I likely am a rare commodity here, as a Kemetic Orthodox, and from my faiths perspective, your "far older" book is but a pup, a blimp on the radar of time. Pieces of our holy works have been found that pre-date Abraham, before Babylon, before the stated beginning of the world in your documentation. Your faith borrowed from ours, one of your key figures was even raised, and trained, by ours. You have no concept of time.
Incidentally, scientific papers pre-date the Christian Bible and the Holy Koran. Might I suggest seeking out the works of Imhotep, Hippocrates, Pythagrias, Su Song, Chang Heng, or Hero?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Was the retraction based on additional research, or just in order to shut up the creationists, in which case the retraction was the mistake?
Albert Einstein was quite publicly a self proclaimed atheist.
Of all the purviews into his personal life, it is the fact that HE HATED the rumors that he was a religious man that got the most attention.
You're only making the problem worse.
He was an atheist, get it through your thick skull.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
"Because it's my position, and I'm unbiased."
Chris Mattern
Oh, and incidentally, "math" as a shortening of "mathematics" is older than "maths," according to this entry from the Online Etymology Dictionary, which states:
So, the British version is in fact the neologism here. American English is typically more conservative in grammatical constructions and preservation of archaic forms, so it's no surprise that we've stubbornly stuck to "our version" all this time. (I won't go into variant spellings, since some of our spellings are the result of a simplified spelling movement, and that definitely is not "conservative" in the least -- but then again, even when Webster and his cohorts were deciding what American spellings should be like, many spellings were not fully standardized.)
But thank you for that ugly display of provincialism.