Reflectorites
On Mon, 10 Jan 2000 18:52:29 -0800, Brian D Harper wrote:
[...]
BH>About Loeb:
>
>Miller was not himself the party guilty of mistranslation. He
>cites two authorities, *both* of which had the mis-translation.
>The most authoritative was also the first, published in 1913.
>The second authority Miller cites was published in 1951. Most
>likely this source just copied the translation error from the
>1913 source. Anyway, I don't think one can really fault Miller
>for not reading the original when a translation was available
>from a reputable authority.
Even if Miller, when he published his 1953 paper, was not aware of the
mistranslation (and let's not forget his mentor Urey who was an expert in
the electrochemistry of gases), my point was that: 1) other German-
speaking OoL specialists surely must have been aware of it and did not
publicly correct Miller anytime in the last 40+ years; and 2) Miller is
aware of it *now* and yet he has to date done nothing about publicly
correcting his error.
It may be OK for eminent Nobel prize-winning scientists to act like
other men in power (e.g. corporate executives, government bureaucrats
and politicians) in being slow to publicly admit their errors, but then science
should not try to pretend that science is better than other human
systems in being uniquely self-correcting.
BH>Also, Yockey has published his conclusions now in a reputable
>journal:
>
>H. P. Yockey, 1997. "Walther Lob, Stanley L. Miller and
>Prebiotic 'Building Blocks' in the Silent Electrical
>Discharge," <Perspectives in Biology and Medicine>,
>41(1):125-131.
Thanks to Brian for the reference. I was already aware of it from the other
List I am on, but I have not yet obtained a copy of it. Maybe Brian can post
some relevant quotes from it?
But now that Yockey has published this in *1997*, if science really was
especially self-correcting then this should have been front-page news on
SCIENCE and NATURE. Remember that Miller won a Nobel prize for his
experiment and his name is in all the Biology textbooks as the founder of
the field of experimental chemical evolution.
That there has been a deafening silence on the part of the leading scientific
journals like SCIENCE and NATURE, leads me to conclude that this is
probably too embarrassing for the rulers of science in this field to admit
that they have known for *years* that: 1) Miller was not the first to
produce amino acids from gases in spark chamber experiments; 2) the
chemical evolution field is not 40+ years old with no results but 80+ years
old with no results!
This is not to say that science does not have normally reliable self-
correcting system in place to detect and prevent most *early* errors.
But once an error has slipped through the net and has been in place for
many years, and the costs of admitting it was wrong (including the public
relations cost in the culture war against creationists), has become very high,
big science is IMHO just like big business and big government, in
downplaying or even ignoring an embarrassing problem in the hope it will
go away.
[...]
Steve
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Stephen E. (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ Email: sejones@iinet.net.au
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Web: http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Warwick 6024 -> *_,--\_/ Phone: +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, Western Australia v "Test everything." (1 Thess. 5:21)
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