Can you see why that would be a problem for his inferences? I’m not going to spoon feed you the answers, you’re going to have to demonstrate that you’re willing to argue from a place of comprehension. I don’t care what you end up believing, but if you can’t correctly characterize the position of the critics of Axe’s work, this discussion is fruitless.
So before anything else, you need to demonstrate you understand what the issue is with Axe using a particularly temperature sensitive enzyme for his experiment (not that this is the only, nor even main thing at issue with his experiment and the conclusions he has drawn from it), and why we think his excuse there doesn’t actually work. Can you do that?
But it would be all over the internet if you or someone else would only enlighten the journal of their mistakes! So they would publish a retraction. I don’t know why people are unwilling to take this step.
Scientists are human! Is my take on this. As evidenced by your reply, again I would ask you, as well as Rumraket, how was the setup flawed, and how did the reviewers not see this?
Faizal: So one paper 17 years ago, and nothing since…
No, there are about a dozen papers listed.
Faizal: Most of your other questions have already been addressed in the preceding discussion, so why not read that first including the relevant links.
Well, I did, actually, and I thought I was picking up where the discussion left off, where some objections that were raised had gone unaddressed.
This does seem like a cop-out, though, I have to do your arguing for you, as well as my own? I think it’s reasonable to test variants which would appear at the lowest level of detectability, otherwise, people would object that you set the bar too high, demanding high-level function.
Rumraket: I have to assume that even you don’t genuinely think that every paper ever published that has not received a direct rebuttal or response paper, must therefore assumed to be true and accurate. Right? Because otherwise you’re going to have to accept a lot conclusions in support of evolution that you presumably reject.
But that was not my point, why did the reviewers not catch the fact that “Axe’s binary assay is not an accurate measurement of enzymatic function”? And again I challenge you and others to inform the journal of their oversights. And this also demonstrates that I do not believe any unchallenged paper is therefore true and reliable. This is how science advances, correct?
Rumraket: Assuming peer review functioned like it should, had Axe stated in his paper what he has said in blog posts, books, interviews, and public presentations, the reviewers would have told him why he can’t extract that conclusion from his experiment and sent his paper back to him to rewrite it.
But a paper need not state all possible conclusions that can be drawn from it. I’m not sure why that is required.
You haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. And, interestingly, I do. I was an editor at a high-impact journal for 10 years, and I was editor-in-chief for 4 of those years. I know Axe’s pitiful paper, and the journal it was published in, and the standards and expectations underlying professional journals. You clearly don’t. You should give some thought to the fact that you spray the forum with claims that reveal only that you are ignorant.
You just revealed that you don’t know what a retraction is, what it’s for, and when it should be undertaken.
Here’s a hint. Do you believe the paper linked below should be retracted? It was published just a few years before Axe’s laugher.
Not at all. Journals aren’t in the habit of publishing rebuttals.
No, but data are. Have you bothered to look at any of the ~1500 papers on catalytic antibodies?
Starting with a ts mutant.
Not bothering with measuring enzyme activity.
Going backwards.
Changing 10 amino-acid residues at a time.
I don’t know who the reviewers were, but I would have seen it in minutes and rejected it, completely independent of the conclusions.
Why? I’m far more qualified as a reviewer than he would be. He has already noted the same problems.
Right there, we’re dealing with trash.
The idea of “evolving a new fold” is the problem. Folds are structural categories, not functional ones.
That’s preposterous, because Axe didn’t bother to do assays.
Why? Science isn’t debate. All of the other data demonstrate the absurdity of Axe’s paper. Have you looked at any?
That’s not a followup and it wasn’t produced in a lab. A real followup would be to use a different protein. Or to go in the correct direction. Or to do cheap enzyme activity assays ($7 each).
Would it? There are far worse and more recent mistakes to talk about. A minor and insignificant paper published more than twenty years ago was wrong? Who would bother?
It isn’t. I meant every word. The challenge should be fairly obvious. How does Axe using a particularly temperature sensitive enzyme affect the calculation he does? Yeah you’re going to have to do thinking now.
Your next response is going to completely settle whether I can even be bothered continuing this discussion. It will quite literally prove to my complete satisfaction whether you’re actually interested in truth, or you have simply decided beforehand that you’re going to do your best to defend Axe even if it doesn’t make sense.
The choice is yours. Either you demonstrate a willingness to comprehend our position, or I simply start ignoring you. It’s that simple.
Yeah I’m already out. You can go and blind yourself for all I care. Any reasonable individual can see that your statement there is a complete misrepresentation of what I have been saying, and you’ve just demonstrated you’re not among the group of people that could be characterized as reasonable.
Good bye, you have the choice to stay ignorant for the rest of your life if you so desire. And your desire seems strong.
This illustrates a distressingly common problem with creationists, including ID proponents. You seem utterly uninterested in actually engaging with the evidence. Or perhaps your level of knowledge means you are incapable of this. Regardless, it is typical of people with your ideological commitment to focus only on rhetoric rather than on scientific evidence.
Your position here seems to be that Axe has, with a single paper, refuted one of the most fundamental theories in all of science. But the scientific community as a whole is just to stupid or ignorant to realize this (being “human”, after all).
It is far more likely that the paper has languished in obscurity (other than among a small number of anti-evolution religious zealots and those who spend time debating these zealots) because it is a seriously flawed paper of negligible scientific value. Even if, like yourself, one is unwilling or unable to appreciate the paper’s flaws, it should be apparent that this second option is the far more likely one.
And, in the space of only two sentences, you completely contradict yourself. Didn’t you just write “Scientists are human”?
Ah. So you are not only lazy and ignorant. You are dishonest as well. My quote, in full:
Did you really think no one would notice your deliberate omission?
@lee_merrill’s comment reflects yet another misconception commonly held by ID afficionados. They are consistently under the misimpression that the leaders of the movement (Dembski, Behe, Gauger, Meyer, Axe, etc.) are prominent figures in their fields. The fact of the matter is their publications are scant to begin with, and are almost never cited (except as part of DI propaganda). Mention their names to the average biologist, and you’ll get nothing but a blank stare.
The boasting of the ID types may have something to do with that. The silliest example I know of was calling Dembski the “Isaac Newton of Information Theory” - when he’s contributed almost nothing to the field. Claude Shannon deserves that title far more.
On this note, I remember being shocked at how sparse the publication records were for some of these individuals, especially Douglas Axe.
Given how niche the intelligent design movement is, I also wonder if part of the appeal for these individuals is having an opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond. Not to mention the opportunity to write and sell pop ID books to the masses.
Yes. On the rare occasion they dopublish, it is invariably some inconsequential study that produces a Great Big Number that can then be (mis)used in the pop books to claim evolution is impossible. Axe’s paper being a perfect example.
It’s hard to tell whether the commenter is credible. He’s right that the paper is garbage and I don’t doubt that Fersht (the lab head) had a falling out with Axe, nor should anyone be confused about why the laughable paper lacks coauthors. But he identifies Axe as a grad student, and even writes “we were there researching for our PhDs at the same time as Ewan Birney.” This is wrong: Axe was a postdoc at the MRC after earning his PhD at Caltech. He was at MRC for a very long time, and his title changed to “research scientist” during the 14 years he was there. That title is often given to a postdoc who has funding (their own or the lab head’s) and is staying in the lab either semi-permanently or for a stint to finish a project. (They are often called “glorified postdocs” which is likely what Axe was.) Regardless of his title, he was not a student, and the commenter’s identification of him as a PhD student is a red flag. My guess is that the commenter overlapped with Axe but didn’t work closely (or at all) with him, and simply knows (as all knowledgeable biologists do) that the 2004 paper is a suspicious joke.
