Casey Luskin DELETES inconvenient evidence

Conversation
1

This deserves it’s own topic. Not much else to say.

In this video we discover that Casey Luskin took a figure from a paper, claimed the scientists who wrote the paper hid the data (the figure itself) in the supplementary materials on purpose because it was inconvenient to evolution, then he himself deleted data from the figure before presenting the numbers to his audience. And he did it because in fact showing that data would make a complete mockery of his entire case.

This is why we call them liars at the Discovery Institute.

11 Likes
2

Leaving aside Luskin’s dishonesty in the presentation of the paper’s data/results, I still can’t get past his bizarre attempt at stoking conspiracy theories about scientists “hiding” this data when it’s being published in one of the most prominent scientific journals.

If scientists really wanted to hide inconvenient data, wouldn’t not publishing it in the first place be a better move?

Does anyone here who supports ID or the DI actually agree with this accusation? Or do you also think Luskin is as out-to-lunch as the rest of us?

6 Likes
3

It doesn’t really matter because we are not the main audience for this misinformation. For every article critical of this instance, there are 30-50 articles from creation apologetics organizations accepting DI’s babble uncritically. This is PR, which has been the sole focus of the DI. It’s never been about sound science. It’s about finding stuff that sounds ‘scientific’.

9 Likes
4

True, and I know I shouldn’t but still, l am surprised about how brazen it is. He literally does what he is accusing the scientists of doing.

I can’t help but wonder whether this recent obsession with this chimp genome paper by the DI, is the DI’s attempt at running damage control for the YECs taking a beating by Erika (aka Gutsick Gibbon) during the whole Tomkins human-chimp similarity fiasco.

They’ve been waiting for some sort of opportunity to try to turn the bad PR around and say something back, and this paper is just some straw they grabbed and created a nonsensical story around.

1 Like
5

Luskin must have gone to the Michael Behe school of selective quoting.

8 Likes
6

For those who prefer writing and/or for those who might misunderstand what Rum means by “deleted,” I will describe the image manipulation that is presented in the article in the DI blog piece. Then I will briefly note the license under which the scientific work was published at Nature.

The DI piece is here on the Wayback Machine; the relevant manipulated image is under “The Technical Details” and can be found here (for now).

Below is the graph in the published paper at Nature. It’s in the Supplemental doc and it’s Figure III.12. It’s just the relevant page from a 174-page PDF file.

Suppl fig III.12 as image.pdf (320.5 KB)

Notice that the x axis (horizontal bottom) of the original graph has tick marks indicating intervals, and a text label: “Gap divergence in 1MB segment”. The graph on the DI website has these things too, and they seem identical. But 5 rows of information, depicting within-species comparisons, have been removed. They were not merely cropped—that alone would be inappropriate and suspicious unless explained clearly and reasonably. No, those rows were removed, and then the x axis, with its tick marks and text label, was fitted onto the bottom of the cropped graph.

If you look very carefully at a magnified view of the lower left corner of the graph on the DI site, you can see a piece of the first deleted graph, just to the right of the 0.00 tick mark.

In summary: the author at the DI site took a graph from a published paper, removed 5 rows from it, then reassembled it to resemble the original. They did not crop the image. They revised it. In the business of publishing, this is image manipulation, and a very serious example of it. An author who did this (for example, while reusing another’s work in a review article) would have committed misconduct and the likely result would be failure to publish their paper or, if it were already published, retraction. I’m not saying these measures apply to a religious blogging site, but I think it might be worthwhile to be explicit about just how inappropriate and unethical this behavior is.

But one more question: did the author violate the licensing agreement under which the scientific data were published? This is not my area of expertise, but here is the text of the open access license that applies, pulled from the article itself:

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

The DI piece clearly acknowledges the scientists and the source, but does not link to the license and most importantly makes no mention of the significant changes they made. This is typically done in an image caption or in an “image credit” section of a piece.

If the DI blogger had included a description of how they revised the figure, would they be in the clear, ethically? I’m unsure. I think so, but only if the description gave a clear reason. And: no scientist I know would do this, not even with a description.

6 Likes
7

I’m tagging a couple of our usual defenders of the DI, because I want to give them the chance to respond to this, and defend the DI’s actions if they believe they are defensible.

@colewd @Giltil

Is there anyone else who should be included?

8

The consequences are more severe when it comes to research proposals. From the Office of Research Integrity:

Although there are many forms of wrongdoing in research,15 only three fall within the federal definition of “research misconduct”: Falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism—commonly known as “FFP”. Federal regulations define the essential elements of FFP in the following manner:

  • Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them.
  • Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record.
  • Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. (45 CFR 93.103)

When FFP occurs in federally funded research (including in proposals for research grants), it is a federal crime that can be punished severely with fines, loss of funding eligibility, and even imprisonment.9,16

Note the bolded statement. This is what Luskin has done.

3 Likes
9

This is what baffles me. Even YEC Rob Carter, who has a more applicable background on genetics than most of his fellow creationists and especially Luskin, ended up conceding that Erika’s work on this was sound. I would have thought the strategy would be to recover to fight another day, let it rest, go quiet, not to touch the human chimp comparison with a ten foot pool. To have YEC back off, and ID which is supposed to be the big tent which can accommodate common descent, take up this lost cause, strikes me as an unforced error. My only guess is that Luskin has (mis)calculated he can capitalize on the prevailing political momentum.

3 Likes
10

3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Casey Luskin calculates human/chimp sequence divergence at 14.9%

11

I knew what that was going to be before I even clicked. Almost exactly the same thing. Why do they think that’s okay?

3 Likes
12

That rather presumes that DI defenders care about, or feel the least impulse to defend, the DI’s dishonesty.

I would suspect the following:

  1. That they have little problem accepting a degree of dishonesty, in promoting what they see as a ‘wider truth’. “The ends justify the means.”

  2. That they would see the best strategy as not defending the dishonesty (defending the dishonesty would only raise its profile and embed it deeper in people’s consciousness – the Streisand effect). Their strategy would be more likely to try to distract the conversation away from the DI’s dishonesty (e.g. back to “% DNA” – @colewd). The sooner the DI’s prior dishonesty can be forgotten, the quicker it can get back to being dishonest without ill-effect.

4 Likes
13

No need to suspect. We’ve already seen their reaction to Raoult being caught publishing fabricated images.

I wouldn’t be surprised at

  1. They admire what Luskin did, and would have done the same thing themselves.

P.S. you forgot @Eddie

1 Like
14

No, I didn’t. :wink:

15

I’m tempted to propose a rule that anyone tagging They-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named should be promoted to moderator and made to deal with the situation.

6 Likes
16

Isn’t such “cruel and unusual punishment” against the Eighth Amendment over there?

2 Likes
17

One must keep in mind that Luskin is a lawyer. Enough said—LOL

18

I suspect you mean that to be understood differently than what I am about to write. But, say what you will about Luskin, he is at least smart enough to get into law school as well as complete one or two other university science programs.

So how likely is it, with all the time he has spent reading evolutionary literature and engaging in debate with evolutionary scientists, that he does not understand the errors he has made in describing the research he claims undermines common ancestry? With many ID proponents, ignorance and stupidity are sufficient explanations for the ridiculous things they say. But, in Luskin’s case, malfeasance is far more likey.

8 Likes
19

You are right, of course. Having endured law school, I can testify that it does take a few brains (not PhD in physics type brains, though) to navigate and Luskin is neither stupid nor ignorant–hence my lawyer joke. Put another way, IMO, he knows exactly what he is doing and of whom his audience is comprised. Bottom line, lawyers are taught to be advocates not truth seekers…

7 Likes
20

I would suggest that none of us who have experienced his … ‘unique qualities’ have forgotten him – but that many of us are trying to – and that we would appreciate any assistance your silence on the subject might offer in that endeavor.

1 Like