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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."'"
This retraction is to be simultaneously celebrated and mourned. Celebrated in the sense that we have a true scientist who will hold up the scientific process and make every effort to prove himself and the community of scientists wrong in order to make the science stronger. When we have individuals that fail to attempt to prove their work as incorrect, we have to acknowledge that they are being driven by other motives and they are not to be trusted.
This noble effort is also to be mourned because of the manipulation and steering of science to fill political goals driven by lack of scientific understanding in the wider community.
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But in all serious, this is going to be a pretty futile effort. It's greatly appreciated but it's probably going to backfire. This could be spun as 'lawyers' forcing a scientist's views out of sight, a scientist that's just trying to tell the truth. The same lawyers that have orchestrated the dinosaur bones found across the world.
And the character assassination from the Creationists will most likely consist of 'waffler' and 'flip-flopper', two terms I have no idea why they even exist.
This is the sign of a man of the highest quality in my eyes. I only wish that everyone--especially the politicians--look to him for guidance in how to 1) take ownership of something when you're wrong and 2) fix it.
My work here is dung.
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.
The amount of confirmation bias that people can exhibit when their passions are challenged is incredible.
he 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 ... creationists cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention.
Wait, so is the earth billions of years old, or 6000 years old, as told in the bible?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
If he discovered clear errors and retracted it for that reason, that's fine, if somewhat tardy.
If he retracted it just because creationists quoted it, that's an example of the same dogma religious zealots are critisized for.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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 1998 i made an inflammatory post on slashdot in a discussion thread about the merits or lack thereof of windows 98. people have used that post to claim that i am a troll. i am not a troll, i am in fact a lurker. by retracting that post i am able to assert that
thank you for your attention
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
You are aware, I trust, that other than a remotely small number of scientists out there, there is no debate. Creationism and Biblical Literalism were tossed in the trash heap of bad ideas beginning in the 18th century (actually a helluva lot earlier, if you count St. Augustine, and even earlier if you count the fact that the Jews hadn't believed in the Hebrew rip-off of Sumerian cosmography for a few centuries prior to Christ).
There is no debate in the scientific community about whether evolution produced all life or not. There's a cultural and political debate, which scientists have been dragged into. Whatever you make of your opinions and claims, don't pretend for one moment that science is on your side.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Hasn't this argument been beaten to death already? Maybe I'm wrong, and yes I'm over simplifying but basically it comes down to this: Science tries to explain *how* things happened, Faith tries to explain *why* things happened. At least in terms of planetary history. Personally, I'm interested in both how and why things happen the way they do. Most times, in my experience, science does a better job at explaining how things are happening and sometimes why they happen. I lost my faith in faith around the time I started asking questions and got back a lot of crappy answers. However, I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of *some* kind of creative force simply because we may not have the tools to demonstrate or understand it fully.
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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While I agree that blanket statements are often stupid, sometimes they are correct. In this case, your experiences seem to fly in the face of everyone else's.
No, science is not based on axioms — you're thinking of mathematics, which is not the same thing. Science is not based on deductive logic like math is — quite the opposite, in fact. Science is based on inductive logic, which works in the opposite direction: the scientist observes the world around him and tries to elucidate its underlying structure from those observations. So in a sense, the scientist does not know what the axioms are; he is trying to discover them.
Ignoring for a moment your misuse of the term "axiom": I will concede that a scientist who has developed his own theories and who accepts them may find it difficult or painful to accept that they are wrong. However, science as a discipline is founded on the notion that models and theories must be tested, and one scientist (or a group of scientists) stubbornly refusing to accept that their models are incorrect does not materially effect science as a whole, especially in the long term. Religion is not at all the same in this regard; many people continue to reject observable phenomena because they contradict their faith.
I should warn you; I am a mathematician. What are Euler's axioms?
Leaving that aside for now, it seems from your comment that you are profoundly confused about the differences between science and mathematics, the latter being properly thought of as a branch of philosophy, and not science at all. Math does not concern itself with what is true in a physical sense; from a mathematical perspective, whether the world is flat or round is of no importance whatsoever. Math is a logical excursion, and at a core level axioms are totally arbitrary. It's a game of logic, and we deduce what we can from a few axioms that we essentially make up. Now, it is true that it is not possible to prove that a sufficiently complex set of axioms is self-consistent; you might say that we take this as a matter of faith. But it isn't faith that is anything like religious faith: it's more like having faith that the Sudoku puzzle you're wrestling with has a solution even if you lack the mathematical ability to prove that it really does.
Math cannot, by its nature, be in conflict with religion. It does not attempt, by itself, to predict or characterize anything in the natural world. That scientists find it a useful tool is a happy coincidence (or unhappy, depending on your belief system).
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.
The assertion that disease is not caused by demonic possession is not falsifiable--does that cast doubt on the germ theory? My point, loosely, is that many attack evolution through what they consider to be its weak point--abiogenesis. Abiogenesis actually isn't part of evolutionary theory, and Darwin's Origin of Species doesn't even address where life came from, only where the variety came from. Anyway, the attack on abiogenesis is easy because you can turn skeptic and say "you can't falsify this, so it's not science," and my point here is that science deals only with the natural world, and all explanations are going to lie in the natural world, even if they have to remain speculative and even hazy. At no point is science going to throw up its hands and say "we can't prove where life started, so it must've been Shiva|Mithra|God|Zeus!" I've read a bit on abiogenesis, and all of the writers I've seen have cautioned repeatedly that the area is speculative at best. It has no bearing on evolutionary theory.
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?
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 :)