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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."'"
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?
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.
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I suspected as much. Interesting, though, that you should pick Euclid as an example: one of his axioms, the parallel postulate, was "overturned" as nearly as one can do such a thing in mathematics: it was found to be independent of the others he advanced. This did not make Euclidean geometry invalid, however, which is very important: Euclidean geometry continues to be studied and is not "wrong" because in a mathematical context, the only way something can be wrong is for it to be logically inconsistent. The discovery that an axiomatic system consisting of Euclid's other axioms plus the logical negation of the parallel postulate itself constitutes a consistent geometry — hyperbolic geometry — resulted in an immense amount of mathematical development, however.
But understand: Euclidean geometry remains just as valid today as it did when Euclid wrote the Elements. It has been refined and placed on more rigorous footing, but none of it was wrong. In fact, it has been shown that hyperbolic geometry is consistent if and only if Euclidean geometry is consistent — one cannot be right and the other wrong. They are either both right, or both wrong.
At the time that mathematicians began studying hyperbolic geometry, there were a lot of hysterical raisins that made a lot of fuss about which was "real". Note, however, that these people were talking about which system better models the real world, and were at their core making physical arguments, not mathematical ones. The same sorts of criticisms were leveled at negative numbers, complex numbers, spaces with dimensions greater than 3, etc. They are always non-mathematical criticisms based on the idea that things that do not have an obvious counterpart in the real world should not be studied. Thankfully, mathematicians have always told these people to sod off.
This is true. At some level, we must take it on faith that we exist and that we can interact with the natural world. But really, if we don't, who cares? Unlike the religion vs. science argument, there aren't really two sides to this.
Yes, it does — sort of. The scientific method is founded on the idea that experiments are repeatable and that observable phenomena have naturalistic causes. This may turn out to be untrue, but to date, we have never had this principle violated. It's important to understand that it's non-trivial to engineer a violation of this principle. If gravity stopped working tomorrow, a scientist would want to know why — he takes it on faith, I suppose, that there is a reason. In order for the scientific method to be unworkable, gravity would not only have to stop working tomorrow, it would also have to do so for no reason whatsoever. It's not just that the future will be like the past, that doesn't adequately capture it. It's that there are reasons for things that happen, and that we are able to understand these reasons.
This might not be true, of course — in fact, it's very likely that there are some things we simply aren't capable of understanding, much as there are many things an ant is not capable of understanding. However, saying that because there are likely to be things we aren't capable of understanding that we should give up on trying to understand what we are capable of understanding is defeatism.