Re: [asa] Building a flagellum step by step

Rich,

There is an amusing irony here. A few months back I gave, on request, a
presentation to my church house-group a presentation on the
Evolution/Creation/ID controversy. I had to tread carefully because three
of the members of the group are YEC-leaning and the rest aren't. However, I
did make my view clear, that so-called "creation science" was for the most
part just a case of wishful thinking. Lest it be seen that I was just
bashing creationists, I pointed out that a lot of science was a case of
wishful thinking, and that the more you wanted a thing to be true the less
careful you were about the controls on your research. I gave the "Cold
Fusion" fiasco as an example. Here a lot of money was wasted at Harwell
labs, where I used to work, attempting to replicate Pons and Fleishmann's
results. If P&F hadn't been so excited about the prospect of solving the
world's energy needs maybe that money could have been saved.

But it now seems ironic to me that there is now an embarrassing example of
what was perhaps wishful thinking in the publication of this "flashy" result
in a peer reviewed journal.

Iain

On 4/25/07, Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> The fact that Nick Matzke jumped all over what could have been the coup de
> grace of ID is significant in and of itself. But, I want to look at some
> more generic lessons here that are mostly independent of the controversy.
>
> 1. As Randy and I have been harping on peer review is necessary and not
> sufficient. You need replication before it becomes the scientific consensus.
> Also, if you want to critique science try and replicate the experiment and
> show that the results don't follow. Nick Matzke did this in his critique
> while Michael Behe did not.
>
> 2. Don't confuse what you want with what is. I don't know how many times I
> repeat this to my kids. This is especially true of something you REALLY
> REALLY want. Do you think that Nick wanted this? You betcha. But he is
> enough of a scientist to see that the evidence didn't line up. This is also
> a cautionary tale about not falsely accusing people of just following a
> worldview. When witnessing to science people appealing to following the
> truth wherever it leads is an effective inducement.
>
> 3. Negative results don't mean universally negative. Michael Behe
> interpreted Nick's critique as disproving step wise development of the
> bacterial flagella. What Nick invalidated was that no *new* homologues
> were found. The previous consensus was confirmed but nothing new was found.
> This is uninteresting science and certainly doesn't warrant being in PNAS.
>
> 4. When running open source science program be very careful with "out of
> the box" parameters. Some filter options apparently were set wrong in the
> BLAST run. If this turns out to be the error it explains why it didn't get
> caught in peer review as the reviewers rarely look at your runsets.
>
> 5. High profile journals need to tone down "flashy" results. How many
> times did we see nanotechnology and step cell papers burn them? At least, be
> extra skeptical when things advance past the consensus.
>

-- 
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After the game, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
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