Evolution Controversy

[cmotherofpirl]

EVOLUTION WATCH
Anthropologist resigns in 'dating disaster'
Panel says professor of human origins made up data, plagiarized works

Posted: February 19, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

A flamboyant anthropology professor, whose work had been cited as evidence Neanderthal man once lived in Northern Europe, has resigned after a German university panel ruled he fabricated data and plagiarized the works of his colleagues.

Reiner Protsch von Zieten, a Frankfurt university panel ruled, lied about the age of human skulls, dating them tens of thousands of years old, even though they were much younger, reports Deutsche Welle.

"The commission finds that Prof. Protsch has forged and manipulated scientific facts over the past 30 years," the university said of the widely recognized expert in carbon data in a prepared statement.


Protsch's work first came under suspicion last year during a routine investigation of German prehistoric remains by two other anthropologists.

"We had decided to subject many of these finds to modern techniques to check their authenticity so we sent them to Oxford [University] for testing," one of the researchers told The Sunday Telegraph. "It was a routine examination and in no way an attempt to discredit Prof. von Zieten." In their report, they called Protsch's 30 years of work a "dating disaster."

Among their findings was an age of only 3,300 years for the female "Bischof-Speyer" skeleton, found with unusually good teeth in Northern Germany, that Protsch dated to 21,300 years.

Another dating error was identified for a skull found near Paderborn, Germany, that Protsch dated at 27,400 years old. It was believed to be the oldest human remain found in the region until the Oxford investigations indicated it belonged to an elderly man who died in 1750.

The Herne anthropological museum, which owned the Paderborn skull, did its own tests following the unsettling results. "We had the skull cut open and it still smelt," said the museum's director. "We are naturally very disappointed."

Protsch, known for his love of Cuban cigars and Porsches, did not comment on the commission's findings, but in January he told the Frankfurter Neue Presse, "This was a court of inquisition. They don't have a single piece of hard evidence against me."

The fallout from Protsch's false dating of northern European bone finds is only beginning.

Chris Stringer, a Stone Age specialist and head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said: "What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside. We are having to rewrite prehistory."

"Anthropology now has to revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 B.C.," added Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the University of Greifswald.

Frankfurt University's president, Rudolf Steinberg, apologized for the university's failure to curb Protsch's misconduct for decades. "A lot of people looked the other way," he said.

[sweetpea316]

Hmm..

[EcceNovaFacioOmni]

:crackup:

Edited February 21, 2005 by thedude

[Brother Adam]

Yep. All creationists have to do to win is sit back and watch them imploed.

[bookwyrm]

[quote name='Brother Adam' date='Feb 21 2005, 11:42 AM'] Yep. All creationists have to do to win is sit back and watch them imploed. [/quote]
That's like the atheists looking at the corruption in the church and saying the same thing. No, I'm not saying science is infallible. I'm just trying to say that one man's corruption doesn't disprove a theory.

[Brother Adam]

True. But priestly sex scandels have nothing to do with Church doctrine. The doctrine of evolution though has no legs to stand on. It's all an illusion, and a very poor one at that. It's a delicate house of cards surrounded by white jackets and diplomias from our universities of 'higher learning'. They won't let you near it for fear it will fall over.

I will likely be one of those 'neo'-Catholics strongly pushing pro-creation material in the Catholic classroom. There is plenty of well researched scientific material out there that can be used.

[Oik]

Adam, your great!

[Melchisedec]

[quote name='Brother Adam' date='Feb 21 2005, 03:51 PM'] It's all an illusion, and a very poor one at that. [/quote]
Thats creationism(religion) in a nutshell.

[Brother Adam]

I was at a non-Catholic board not to long ago and a Catholic looked at the non-Catholic and said "I belong to the true Church, your faith is rooted in heresy". To which the non-Catholic said "No, you're faith is rooted in heresy".

What exactly does accomplish? In my estimation, nothing.

[Melchisedec]

[quote name='Brother Adam' date='Feb 22 2005, 03:21 PM'] I was at a non-Catholic board not to long ago and a Catholic looked at the non-Catholic and said "I belong to the true Church, your faith is rooted in heresy". To which the non-Catholic said "No, you're faith is rooted in heresy".

What exactly does accomplish? In my estimation, nothing. [/quote]
In the case you cited, nothing - because they are all based on faith not facts. Creationism is not a science. Evolution is a science that has been used and still is being used, and its been observed in both micro and macro levels.

[i]When Charles Darwin pondered the wonderfully diverse beaks and bodies and lifestyles of the finches on the Galapagos Islands, he wrote these classic words:

"Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds one species had been taken and modified for different ends."

It was an idea that was to strike him again and again because, in the 13 different species of Galapagos finches, the young naturalist saw the living results of creatures adapting to pressures imposed by varying environments.

Now three California scientists, led by Darren Irwin of the University of California at San Diego, have explored a very different race of birds around the Himalayan mountain range. The scientists say they have discovered the most compelling evidence yet to buttress the theory Darwin elaborated in his epochal volume "The Origin of Species," which ignited a revolution in human thought.

And another biologist, David B. Wake of UC Berkeley, has added to that evidence from his own years studying evolution in a group of colorful California salamanders.

Wake's little amphibians and Irwin's Eurasian songbirds are known as "ring species" because their forms have gradually altered as their populations have settled around a geographic ring of varied habitats and adapted over time to the demands of their different environments.

Trekking for thousands of miles from camps and village huts, Irwin and his colleagues tracked a single species of the drab songbirds called greenish warblers that settled to nest and breed in forest habitats encircling Asia's treeless Tibeten Plateau. The researchers have found an evolutionary surprise:

The warbling songs of the birds differ slightly in each habitat, their body sizes vary, their wing markings change, and even their genes have diverged further and further apart.

Populations of warblers, like other birds, easily mate and interbreed with neighboring groups around the ring. But when Irwin studied two separate populations of the birds that coexist in Siberia far from their original range,

he found that they do not mate at all, and they differ strikingly in other characteristics.

What had clearly been a single songbird species now bore all the signs of having evolved into two distinct species.

To meet such extremely different environments, the birds, it seems, had indeed been "modified for different ends," as Darwin put it more than 150 years ago. Irwin's remarkable evidence of evolution in the birds called Phylloscopus trochiloides was published in a recent issue of the journal Nature.

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Irwin and Staffan Bensch,

a UC San Diego colleague, are pursuing research into the genes of the birds this year at the University of Lund in Sweden, while the third member of the group, population biologist Trevor D. Price of UC San Diego, is studying more of the warbler habitats in India.

For Irwin, the report in Nature climaxed six years of exploring. He and his colleagues trekked through forests, mountains and grasslands in China, India, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan and Russian Siberia, where the birds had established different habitats in different environments over thousands of years.

Capture, Measure, Release

Using fine-mesh "mist" nets, the standard tool of ornithologists, Irwin caught nearly 150 of the birds painlessly and released them quickly after measuring their wings, legs, tails and beaks, and photographing their plumage. A single feather and a tiny blood sample for DNA analysis in the lab was taken from each warbler.

The team also recorded the warblers' songs, and in each habitat Irwin played the male birds' songs back to the females - sometimes to their puzzlement, sometimes to their anger, but often to their sexually eager response, Irwin found.

Finally, in Siberia where the two populations of the warblers coexist at the northern end of their ring of habitats, the two varieties of Phylloscopus could no longer recognize each other's songs at all. In the warblers, mating songs are essential to sexual selection, and warbler songs were keys to their species evolution.

"Our results show how gradual divergence in a trait involved in mate choice leads to the formation of new species," Irwin wrote in the team's Nature report.

The colored bars on the wings of the two groups of birds that coexist in Siberia also differed markedly, Irwin found. One group wears a single yellow bar on each wing, while the other bears two - another key to sexual selection, he says.

All those differences, and especially the fact that the two groups of birds in Siberia do not interbreed, provide the most defining evidence that the two songbird populations have become truly separate species, Irwin and Price agree.

"They act like separate species, and the genetic evidence supports that conclusion," Irwin said. "In central Siberia today, the original species has definitely become two species." [/i]

[url="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/26/MN172778.DTL"]Evolving Before Our Eyes[/url]

[Honour]

If you beleive in the bible you have to believe in somekind of evolution...you simply couldn't fit even only 2 of each species on earth today in the arc...it wasn't big enough. Does mean the whole kit-in-a-kaboodal sp? happened the was we think it did.

I believe in the literal creation story, young Earth and all...I also believe in evolution, and that it very well could have been possibly from a single cell. Strange but true, it all fits in my head.
But I'm still iffy on the pre-biotic stuff.

but I do dissagree...many creationists base their believes solely on faith, true, but others are grounded in science....Hugh Ross and the folks at [url="http://www.reasons.org"]Reasons to Believe[/url] for example...I haven't really read their stuff but, its something to ponder.

[Neal4Christ]

Evolution is a theory at best. Anything you say about creationism is just as applicable to evolution. Both models require faith, because we were not at the beginning nor can we reproduce it. The one who believes in evolution and the one who believes in creation must both do the same thing: place his faith somewhere. Belief in evolution does not make one any more "scientific" than the one who believes in creation.

[EcceNovaFacioOmni]

[quote name='Melchisedec' date='Feb 22 2005, 04:54 PM'] In the case you cited, nothing - because [b]they are all based on faith not facts[/b]. [/quote]
I think you misunderstand Christianity.

[-Ryan-]

Are catholics pro-creationist? What's the stance of the Vatican on the issue?

[Oik]

I don't know what it means to be a "creationist."

I have a rather complex view of the creation of man. I simply can't, on the meager and sparse, often changing evidence, subscribe to evolution.
Evolution doesn't account for why consciousness was "developed" in man. It also fails to account for the human soul.

On the other hand, I admit that that species have "seemed" to change."

This however, only goes to show that all species are able to change certain features.

Metaphysically, evolution is a load of marlarky. If something can potential be a human, then it is actually a human. So, an ape couldn't become a man unless he already was a man. In that case though, he would have never been an ape.

The adaptions that we see in species are already potentially in any given species, so there is no real "evolution," only development within a pre-set capacity.

God set it all up and plays an imitmate role in each step of every process.