Several people have written to me expressing their concern over the recent publication of this paper:
Evidence for Intelligent Design in Gastrointestinal Endocrinology: Identification of Novel Cholecystokinin/Gastrin-Like Peptides in the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.
Greeley GH Jr, Endocrinology. 2008 Jun;149(6):3184-6.
Oh, no! Have the creationists scored a coup and snuck propaganda into a legitimate science journal? Have no fear. This is a short review paper by an editor describing some work on cholecystokinin phylogeny. Some of you old-school physiology types may recall that a colloquial term for this class of hormones is “brain-gut peptides” — molecules that are expressed in both the gut and the central nervous system (and many other places). CCK is produced in the endocrine cells of the upper small intestine and in neurons in the brain, apparently prompting a weak joke linking intelligence and gastrointestinal hormones. It is not pro-ID at all. It even says, “the work of Janssen and
co-workers elegantly defends the hypothesis that the mammalian CCK/gastrin-CCK1R/2R signaling system is an ancient signaling system with counterparts throughout the evolutionary tree.”
Turn off the sirens and return to your homes. All is well. It’s just another false positive in the literature for Intelligent Design.
Quite unfortunate language.
I think you’d agree.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Nothing shown here explains why the ID phrase was included in the title.
PZ,
I saw that too, very imprudent title! I’m far more concerned that the Biologic Institute just got its first paper published, in PLoS ONE – this is especially mortifying for me since I have an evolutionary biology paper published there. It presents modeling software without mention of intelligent design, but it gives them something to bray about. I would love to see it fisked and will be watching the ensuing developments carefully.
How long before IDers start mentioning this paper as “evidence” of something? It wouldn’t be the first time they cling to the mere title of a scientific work prove their case, would it?
Come on. A title is all they need to start crowing from the highest rooftops. I expect this to be on the Evolution News blog @ the DI soon.
Thanks PZ. Next time sound the all-clear before I buy the $26.99 pitchfork.
Two bottles of freshly made elderflower cordial that Uncommonly Dense is gonna crow about this being a success within the month!
This topic could give a whole new meaning to “Expelled.”
Any one wanna bet that creationists will still find something to do with this?
Damn! You beat me to it. Fact is, they will. Check out the book, Scientist Confront Creationist. They site past examples where creationist have don exactly that!
The ‘press release’ on the PLoS paper here
http://biologicinstitute.org/2008/06/04/introducing-stylus%e2%80%94new-software-for-a-new-take-on-evolutionary-simulation/
I couldn’t help noting the shall we say *religious* avoidance of terminology used in evolutionary biology, in favor of what seems to be engineering and linguistics jargon.
It leads them to claims like:
“In life, body plans serve the needs of particular modes of life, organs serve the needs of particular body plans, tissues serve the needs of particular organs, cells serve the needs of particular tissues, protein functions serve the needs of particular cells, protein structures serve the needs of particular protein functions, protein sequences serve the needs of particular structures, and genes serve the needs of these particular protein sequence requirements.”
All of which sound logical, until you start to consider the
‘mistakes’ or ‘leftovers’ of evolution that persist in organisms and genomes….
Gotta wonder who reviewed the PLoS paper.
The standard spin is that such language appears because intelligent design as they understand it is so obvious that the standard suppression cannot prevent it from appearing from time to time.
More like science has its share of mediocre, or worse, writers.
But if you’re straining due to a lack of any evidence for your claims, you grab everything you can. They’ll do it here as well, for they can play their old “we’re not opposed to evolution” game (even though most in their “big tent” are very opposed to it), ‘we just recognize that evolution needs more than randomness, and so does this paper.’
In fact this:
doesn’t precisely answer, say, Behe’s claims. As far as I can tell, there is some leeway in claiming “intelligent design during evolution” in the paper.
Regardless of that, all evolution has evidence of essentially the same processes of mutation and selection (plus drift, etc.) acting, with nothing distinguishing between the “designed” processes claimed, and the “natural processes” admitted. It’s bizarre that quite different processes would leave indistinguishable evidence, and even more bizarre to claim to be able to distinguish the processes from indistinguishable evidence.
I had to add that, because it appears to me (having not read the paper) that there is an opening to claim ID from the language used, which should not be the case.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
I’ve always been an aficionada of funny or smart-ass titles. When I was deciding on a title for my dissertation in comparative anatomy knowledge representation, it occurred to me that if I went with my first impulse, someday, some humorless ID type* might call me out as an apologist for some of Haeckel’s less-robust work.
I still went ahead and named it “Ontology Recapitulates Phylogeny”, and if anyone doesn’t get the joke, I’ll just refer them to this comment where I predicted their reaction.
But this article title doesn’t seem funny, just kind of strange in context. I’ll have to get the whole thing next chance I have to access Endocrinology, and see where they’re trying to go with it.
* I know, that’s redundant
Interestingly, last year another paper in PLoS ONE on AIDS and circumcision raised a huge fracas (check the discussion section). The journal covers “primary research from any scientific discipline” but I think the boundaries can get a bit too blurry.
Say, this reminds me:
Whatever did happen with Proteomics? Where are Han and Warda now?
For true horror, see the ICR’s “Research” papers.
I took a look at the Accelerated Decay: Theoretical Models paper (by a Bob Jones Uni prof, naturally), and…wow. It’s basically a half-coherent ramble about string theory with creationist nonsense interspersed here and there. Most of the actually factual correct content could have been lifted straight out of a popular science text on the subject, and they give naught but a single paragraph explaining how string theory “supports” their conclusion (that vastly accelerated radioactive decay occurred during the first three days of the “creation week,” and possibly also during the Fall and/or Flood).
The article also include totally irrelevant factoids, such as nomenclature history:
And guidelines for pronunciation:
Favorite paper titles (I agree, this one sucks):
“Identifying species from pieces of faeces” Conservation Genetics 5:109-111 (2004).
“Homage to Santa Anita” Evolution 37:1075-1084 (1983)
subtitled “Thermal sensitivity of sprint speed in agamid lizards”
(kind of an ecologists’ in-joke, but very funny)
“Hot rocks or not-so-hot-rocks” Ecology 70:931-944 (1989)
subtitled “Retreat-site selection by garter snakes and its thermal consequences
Animal behavior journals are rife with cutesy titles, but I think most of them come off as pseudo-clever and, well, stupid.
Discovery Institute proclaims that science has found evidence for intelligent design in 5, 4, 3, 2, …
Alright, I’ll put my pitchfork back under my bed for now… =)
It doesn’t make any difference what the paper actually says, because the creationists will claim it anyway. They know no one they’re trying to “convince” will read it, so all they have to do is push around the title. It must really be nice being completely without morals (or brains).
but why doesn’t glutamate have such a hard time crossing the blood-brain barrier???
Gina C. Gould & Bruce MacFadden (2004): Nothing in evolution makes sense without a good phylogeny…
There’s IIRC a transporter for it, and you’re using an RSS feed and therefore commenting on the wrong thread. What is the point of RSS, actually?
genesgalore:
You mean why does glutamate have a hard time crossing the BBB? For the same reason everything else that’s not lipid-soluble has a hard time. It’s a barrier. (Unfenestrated endothelium, tight junctions…) This is easily Googlable.
This is not a problem. This is a joke. It is a good thing. Yes, some IDiots may cite it. Then we smusch them.
Sven #16
Regarding the paper, “Identifying species from pieces of faeces”
Is this a continuation of the authors’ previous work with Shinola?
A couple more entertaining (aka smart-ass) paper titles:
What, if anything, is a rabbit? Evolution (1957)
TBE, or not TBE; that is the question: Beneficial usage of tris-borate for obtaining a higher resolution of small DNA fragments by agarose gel electrophoresis. Nagoya Medical Journal (1999).
per #25 – for the unenlightened….
Shinola
#25
C Barr is today’s winner of the internets.
In other news, we can turn off another set of sirens: the South Carolina antievolution bill died.
Turn off the sirens
We have sirens?
Wheee!
Pieces of feces? Shinola? What’s the diff?
Which of course reminds one of the hoary old tale of the teacher, grading student writing, that got the opportunity to make the ultimate comment on spelling, to wit:
‘A “burro” is an ass. A “burrow” is a hole in the ground. One really should know the difference.’
“Pieces of feces? Shinola? What’s the diff?”
So I take it you’re a lumper and not a splitter?
Ew! No! Nothing’s worse than lumpy Shinola!
#7 – Sili- Wow, I thought I was the only person left making Elderflower cordial! My recipe is an old English one that calls for over 2 pounds of sugar. Urgh! How much sugar do you use? Do you make Elderflower fritters?
When the mob assembles I have a 10 tined manure fork, I’ll spread some Shinola on it just to be festive. ;)
#26 Review article titles tend to be creative. Here’s another:
Block, SM. Fifty ways to love your lever: myosin motors. Cell 87:151-7 (1996).
@ Glen D:
Tiny URLs are evil. They mask the true destination of your hyperlink, a red flag for phishing scams. Tiny URLs are counter-intuitive and user-unfriendly. Please read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL & stop using them.
Thanks.
In other news…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7435757.stm
Embryonic Cuttlefish smarter than the average undergrad!
@ the Biologic Institute paper: On UD in the comments they are already bragging about how there are no beneficial mutations in the simulation. I see numerous flaws in that “conclusion”, especially related to the starting conditions and the proficiency function. But then again, it might be because I’m drunk. If I find the time, i’ll elaborate.
Turns out that life has been intelligently designed.
Well, not quite life, but on its way to being life. It can replicate DNA, anyhow. Doesn’t even use enzymes to do it.
And it wasn’t done by anything supernatural, but by a research team at Harvard.
@sam:
http://lifehacker.com/381588/avoid-blind-tinyurl-clickthroughs
there are places where one has no choice but to shorten the links, or they don’t show up at all.
as to tinyurl itself, their terms of use are pretty clear:
It doesn’t stop one from misusing it, if uncaught, but it’s not like tinyurl is actually supporting misuse, either.
personally, I’ve never had a problem with it, and have used it often enough over the past few years. Results may vary, but there are ways of addressing concerns short of abandoning the service altogether.
btw, @Glen:
having just now realized what your tinyurl is pointing to…
did you ever check out the work on electrical communication in knifefishes being done in Walter Heiligenberg’s lab at Scripps?
If not, you would probably be interested. I spent some time with him back when I was just a lowly high school student/undergrad and was considering Scripps for grad work.
He died a while back, but his lab did a lot of good work on the subject, and I seem to recall that the lab itself is still active.
here ’tis:
http://www.cnl.salk.edu/~kt/Heiligenberg_Lab.html
I hope someone with some biology credentials gives the authors and editors a solid kick up the pants on that one. What morons! The ID crowd will use that without any trace of shame.
Brownian, OM, et al, re. pitchforks:
You should all act soon. Pitchforks, Torches and Beyond is having a sale. I got a lovely 3 tine pair with free torches (limit 3 per person) and a set of bamboo fingernail slivers with matches for less than $15.
That’s hard to beat with a stick (hard ash, $1.99, pine, $0.48).
Re: tinyurls:
If the url is changed to:
&emsp http://preview.tinyurl.com/whatever
Then the user can see first where the link is going to.
Best meta-snipe in a title:
Queller DC “The spaniels of St Marx and the Panglossian paradox: a critique of a rhetorical programme”. Q. Rev. Biol. 70 (1995)
Ah, a paper from Axe. I was afraid that those papers of Marks and Dembski had been passed in a peer-reviewed magazine, with all their remaining errors.
I heard someone mentioning a paper with “chinese characters”, I have to assume it is this one that got the usual creationist pre-circulation for vetting of the worst mistakes.
I wonder if anyone is going to comment on this paper? I’m no biologist, but at a first glance I find some questions:
– Axe et al define fitness essentially as conformity with a (unique) pattern of vectors. (See supplement S1.) Hasn’t proteins, their target traits, functional, structural and nonfunctional parts?
– They introduce a (constant) likelihood of auxiliary conditions that could contribute to fitness (i.e. variance). Isn’t this just in order to mask that any changes will almost always mean decreased fitness, due to the absence of localized sites?
– They introduce a cost into the fitness function, against the genome growing in size. A cost based on a reference to growth conditions, not selection conditions. Isn’t the ability to change gene and protein size important?
Well, in short it seems to me they claim that most any deviance from an idealized target immediately means decreased fitness, because that is how they set it up. They also implicitly claim that evolution is powerless, again because they impose arbitrary conditions.
Next paper could then be allocated to see how that results in very small probabilities that “near-neutral” random drift keeps a unique function…
“””…..It leads them to claims like:
“In life, body plans serve the needs of particular modes of life, organs serve the needs of particular body plans, tissues serve the needs of particular organs, cells serve the needs of particular tissues, protein functions serve the needs of particular cells, protein structures serve the needs of particular protein functions, protein sequences serve the needs of particular structures, and genes serve the needs of these particular protein sequence requirements.”……..
….–…….””
Head bones connected to the neck bone
neck bone connected to the shoulder bone
shoulder bone connected to the arm bone
arm bone connected to the hand bone
hand bone connected to the wanker bone…..
So what! If that’s all they can celebrate about it’s a pitiful showing.
#45
Axe has developed a strategy of publishing papers based on protein mutagenesis studies and modeling (in this case, just modeling) in legitimate journals (three total, with the earlier two in The Journal of Molecular Biology). These papers discuss complexity but make no claims about intelligent design, yet the DI treats them as if they did.
Contrast this to Scott Minnich, who has published some legitimate microbiology papers that don’t lend themselves to ID spin and aren’t touted on the DI web site. Despite his credentials, he’s not part of the Biologic Institute. Neither is Michael Behe, whose paper in Protein Science took a tack similar to Axe’s but prompted a full-length paper with point-by-point rebuttals from Michael Lynch in the same journal.
re:
Question from an ignorant antipodean: What are the implications of the bill “Dying in committee”? Is this a cop-out to make no decision on the bill but still get rid of it? Does it send a strong message of ‘Couldn’t be bothered getting to this junk.’?
In short – is this the slap-down it deserves?
In short – is this the slap-down it deserves?
hard to say for sure, but in looking at the history of these kinds of bills, the only reason to draft them to begin with is typically to placate some localized fundie base, or some congressional demented fuckwit. They rarely make it out of committee, intentionally.
so, I’d say that’s a likely conclusion on your part.
which doesn’t mean that if the fundies scream loud enough, it wouldn’t be re-introduced in next year’s session.
Nobody’s called anybody else an ignorant slut yet. What’s going on? I thought some heat might generated by the tinyurl thing but nuthin’. Disappointing. Not trolling, just saying is all.
:-)
Bleck! I’m sure there will be plenty to come.
In happier news – some blokes in the next suburb over have had a windfall (AUS$59million!) and in a refreshing change from the usual “oooooh praise da LURD!” have decided to give the Universe some credit.
Still magical thinking, of course, but at least not the usual theist rubbish.
On the elderflowers, champagne is even more fun than cordial. But more likely to explode.
On the silly paper titles, a colleague of mine once wrote a paper about a transposable element in molluscs. All my pleading could not induce her to call it “The Shellfish Gene”.
Shane #50, you ignorant … oh never mind.
Turn off the sirens
PZ, maybe you should have something like that. Sounds would be annoying, but a putting a red or yellow alert around your banner might be a cool addition to the site.
My favourite paper title:
The misbehavior of organisms (1961)
by K Breland, M Breland
American Psychologist
It’s a classic paper as well, by two recovering Skinnerians. Can be read at: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Breland/misbehavior.htm
At least we know it’s science now. Now if someone would please tell me this is a joke:
http://www.youvebeenleftbehind.com/index.html
Thanks in advance.
No.
Mike Fair has said he knew that when he pushed the current bill into the legislature that there wasn’t enough time left in this session to address the bill fully and that it would die. But he said it was just his way of signaling that he will be shoving it back in next session so that it gets a full review. Mr. Fair had been behind many other bills in the evolution of Creationism / ID (teach the controversy, academic freedom, equal time etc..) introduced in South Carolina.
Fully expect to see this again next legislative session in SC.
I’ve been trying to relocate a paper I had at one point. I can’t remember the title, but it was quite long and had a form something like this:
“A new record of Taraxacum officinale from Imperial County California, found growing on July 7, 1974 in Oak Chaparral on Little Mountain, 5 miles NW of Springfield via state highway 22, collected by John Smith, Richard Doe, and Jane Brown”.
The full text of the article was a single sentence stating “We found it there then”. There was also an acknowledgements section that spanned several paragraphs.
I’ve made up the details above; I can’t remember the actual species or locality being reported, but I think it was something found on top of a mountain in Southern California or Baja. Does this ring a bell with anybody? I’d like to find this article again
Oh yeah, I almost forgot.
happy National Day of Slayer.
Unfortunately this won’t stop the creationists from taking the title of the paper and using it for their campaigns, knowing full well that most people won’t actually read the paper in question.
The braying has begun:
Of course, they fail to mention that PLoS is several journals, including the prestigious PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, while PLoS ONE is, well, a catch-all that is frequently not the first place people send their paper.
Andrew #58
I haven’t read the whole paper, but I do remember scanning the abstract.
Re: clever titles, my personal favorite:
Gibbs, R., Nayak, N., & Cutting, C. (1989). How to kick the bucket and not
decompose: Analyzability and idiom processing. Journal of Memory
and Language, 28, 576-593.
Waaah! I had forgotten about the classic:
John J. Wiens, Ronald M. Bonett & Paul T. Chippindale (2005): Ontogeny discombobulates phylogeny: paedomorphosis and higher-level salamander relationships, Systematic Biology 54(1), 91 — 110.
Nature News and Views articles sometimes have good titles, like:
Carrasquillo, Y. and Swiett, J. Craving cocaine pERKs up the amygdala. Nature Neuroscience 8 129-130 (2005).
My favorite Nature title is
R.A. Pettifor, C.M. Perrins and R.H. McCleery, Individual optimization of clutch size in great tits. Nature 336 (1988), pp. 160-162.
No, I haven’t and I think I would be interested.
I’ll have to check it out. Thanks Ichthyic.
Glen D
http://geocities.com/interelectromagnetic
[just this once I’m using the longer version to demonstrate how it is barely more informative than the tinyurl]
Who the hell thought that would be a good title??