Right-Wingnut Randall Hoven: Stupid, Liar, or Lazy? Part III

I dealt with two of the gross lies about vaccination, and medical research being spread by Randall Hoven, writing for the ironically named right-wing rag, “American Thinker.” Right-Wingnut Randall Hoven next makes the asinine assertion that,

“Do you know how many medical research papers were withdrawn from publication due to major errors or outright fraud in the last decade? The answer is 788.

That is, hundreds of medical research papers have errors so egregious that the papers had to be withdrawn completely. And half or more of the rest might have serious errors.

This pushed several of my out-rage buttons. First, the medical literature is very different from the normal science literature. In a scientific publication the originality and novelty of the research is hugely important. It is considered entirely unprofessional, and unethical to repeat a publication, or “self-plagiarize.” So, a research project will have the following minimal sets of publications, 1) a technical, or progress report to the funding source, 2) one or more conference Abstracts, 3) a journal publication, 4) a book chapter. Until you get to step 3) a journal, all the others are considered “prepublication,” and are not given much academic or scientific credit. Anyone publishing the same data, with the same analysis more than once will either be rejected from publication, or at least privately disparaged as a “publication whore.” Most large journals have specific instructions on prepublication. Since the number of publications a young professor has weighs so heavily toward their retention, or promotion, we used to joke (darkly) about the academic SPDS, or Smallest Publishable Data Set.

The medical literature is very different. This has two reasons. The first is that there are many more medical publications than for the sciences. This is because medical device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies spend many millions of dollars each year on advertisements. These millions of dollars underwrite many hundreds of magazines, and thousands of editors. Something has to fill in the pages between the ads, and that something is medical research. The second difference is that the medical literature serves as the post graduation source for clinical education. These magazines, visits from drug vendors, and “continuing medical education” requirements are how daily practice physicians, nurses, and all other adjunct clinicians learn what current practices are. This creates a tremendous market for medical research articles. This also means that for many medical magazines, the readers are not trained as scientists and are far more trusting of a table of statistics than are general scientists. So, if there is a paper circulated in the medical literature with multiple authors to multiple journals, and at least part of the data is bad, then there could be five or six papers that become “contaminated.”

The link Hoven gave is to another “PhysOrg” news item, “US scientists significantly more likely to publish fake research” November 16, 2010;

“The study author searched the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn—and therefore officially expunged from the public record—between 2000 and 2010.

A total of 788 papers had been retracted during this period. Around three quarters of these papers had been withdrawn because of a serious error (545); the rest of the retractions were attributed to fraud (data fabrication or falsification).

There are a few problems here. First, we are given no idea of how important these 788 withdrawn papers are in the grand scheme. Second, there are many reasons a paper might be retracted. Not infrequently, a journal will retract an article because it was plagiarized, and the real authors have complained. The results could be totally acceptable- they probably are- but they were stolen. Then, authors might find that they cannot repeat their own earlier result. This can happen totally innocently. I knew one fellow graduate student who brewed up a potential cancer cure- a real one shot “magic bullet.” Worked great, except the second batch did nothing, and the third batch did nothing. Nothing he tried for the next 2 years worked at all, and then he dropped out of school and was drafted.

And what are these numbers? Consider that in 2010 alone nearly 38,000 papers were published on medical/clinical topics as indexed by PubMed. This turns out to be not too far from an average annual rate. Even for all retracted papers as in the number quoted above, this is barely 20 per 10,000 papers withdrawn for any reason between 2000 and 2010. As we will see below, this is about the same global result found from several independent studies. Mr. Hoven is blowing his mind over a 20/10,000 “crisis.” It turns out to be even smaller, as the rate for deliberate fraud falls to under 2 in ten thousand.

Another problem is that the PhysOrg news item never gave a valid citation. Where did these numbers come from? This is a common problem with this source, and a competent ‘reporter,’ which Mr. Hoven is clearly not, would refuse to use unattributed assertions. A database search of all articles published in the Journal of Medical Ethics revealed only one potential study with the same combination of numbers, “Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?” J Med Ethics 2011;37:113-117 doi:10.1136/jme.2010.038125

There are, ironically, methodological issues that I would have as a reviewer of Dr. Steen's articles. For example, the author R. Grant Steen was the only person (apparently) to have read the articles and retraction notices. It is only his opinion as to the validity of the retraction. Plus, of all the reasons a paper might be retracted, he split the entire list in either “fraud,” or “other error.” And in a re-analysis of his own data, Steen discovered that just “… two repeat offender authors were responsible for 14% of all articles retracted for fraud over the last decade.” (“Retractions in the scientific literature: is the incidence of research fraud increasing?” J Med Ethics 2011;37:249-253 Published Online First: 24 December 2010 doi:10.1136/jme.2010.040923). I think it is worth pointing out that in this reanalysis, the number of retracted papers had also dropped to 742.

And, the author of this study, R. Grant Steen, has published five articles from the same data in the last year; four of them in the same magazine; the Journal of Medical Ethics. This is a perfect example of how multiple papers are published in the medical literature from a single piece of research. Dr. Steen is also the President of a private company “Medical Communication Consultants (MCC)” that is “… a full-service, medical writing firm designed to meet the needs of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.” (From their corporate website: http://medicomconsultants.com/ ). So, in addition to a noble desire to advance knowledge, Dr. Steen has a very legitimate goal of furthering the interests of his company.

Motivated by the reports of medical literature fraud published by Dr. Steen, Prof. T. A. Abinandanan conducted a study of retracted papers from the PubMed index for the same years. Abinandanan found the misconduct rate from India, his homeland to be 44 per one hundred thousand papers, as opposed to a global average of 17/100,000. (“Publish and perish” VT Yadugiri, CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 101, NO. 4, 25 AUGUST 2011 477). That’s correct, 1.7 frauds per ten thousand publications. And now recall that Dr. Steen found that “… two repeat offender authors were responsible for 14% of all articles retracted for fraud over the last decade.”

There was a considerably stronger paper on medical literature article retractions that was also recently published by the Journal of Medical Ethics; “Why and how do journals retract articles? An analysis of Medline retractions 1988–2008.” The authors, Elizabeth Wager, Peter Williams use a better data sample from Medline, used a more sensitive evaluation criteria, and were able check each other for rating bias. (J Med Ethics 2011;37:567-570 doi:10.1136/jme.2010.040964). In all, the rated 312 examples of retracted papers out of a total of 870. I’ll quote their Methods, Results and Conclusion directly from the Journal;

Methods: We retrieved all available Medline retractions from 2005 to 2008 and a one-in-three random selection of those from 1988 to 2004. This yielded 312 retractions (from a total of 870). Details of the retraction including the reason for retraction were recorded by two investigators.

Results: Medline retractions have increased sharply since 1980 and currently represent 0.02% of included articles. Retractions were issued by authors (63%), editors (21%), journals (6%), publishers (2%) and institutions (1%). Reasons for retraction included honest error or non-replicable findings (40%), research misconduct (28%), redundant publication (17%) and unstated/unclear (5%). Some of the stated reasons might have been addressed by corrections.

Conclusions: Journals' retraction practices are not uniform. Some retractions fail to state the reason, and therefore fail to distinguish error from misconduct.”

So, to review for Mr. Hoven, the "Crisis" is fewer than 2 fraudulent papers per one hundred thousand. But, you idiot, YOU wrote,

That is, hundreds of medical research papers have errors so egregious that the papers had to be withdrawn completely. And half or more of the rest might have serious errors.

Where did "half or more of the rest might have serious errors," come from? RIGHT! That came from the other stupid errors you have made.

So, Mr. Hoven concludes that he and his should skip vaccinations, and leave all the associated costs and risks to others because, “We should not be treated like benighted troglodytes for being skeptical of medical "science.”

No, not troglodytes, Mr. Hoven- you should be treated like lazy, stupid, selfish, dishonest parasites.


What a dumb ass!

Randall Hoven is either stupid, or lying, Part II

I dealt with the gross lies by Hoven regarding vaccinations earlier, but he doubled down with some bullshit about statistics in the medical literature. I have to admit this is a particularly sore issue with me. I tried for years to teach statistics to medical residents when I was a professor of medicine, and soon had more faculty attending my seminar than students. The trouble was that none of them would do their homework I assigned. They always used “my patient was dying!” excuse. I preferred the more credible third grader's “The dog ate it” excuse.

Randall Hoven grossly misrepresented a recent article in the scientific literature, “Erroneous analyses of interactions in neuroscience: a problem of significance” Sander Nieuwenhuis, Birte U Forstmann & Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, (Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 14, 1105–1107 (2011) doi:10.1038/nn.2886 ).

Here is what Randall Hoven had to say;

Do you know how many doctors, some literally brain surgeons, made an important statistical mistake in their studies? Half of them. These were studies trying to prove that some medical treatment was actually effective.

Yes, half the studies showing that some medical treatment is effective are in error. We just found that out this week (at least for neuroscience journals).

This is either stupid, or dishonest. I cannot tell anymore. Really; Stupid? Dishonest? Dishonest? Stupid? It is so hard.

Randall quoted a secondary news article, “Study finds statistical error in large numbers of neuroscience papers” by Bob Yirka (PhysOrg, September 13, 2011). The quote is,

Sander Nieuwenhuis and his associates from the Netherlands have done a study on one particular type of statistical error that apparently crops up in an inordinately large number of papers published in neuroscience journals. In their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, they claim that up to half of all papers published in such journals contain the error.

Well, Bob is a jerk (see below). So, does that let Randall of the hook? Only if he is too lazy to read the original article, and he expects his readers to accept his grossly incompetent ability to read. Probably this is a safe assumption, since none of these Bozos seem able to read a scientific paper.

The authors of the Nature Neuroscience article actually had a fairly modest goal to teach that, “when making a comparison between two effects, researchers should report the statistical significance of their difference rather than the difference between their significance levels.”

So, there is some event, E, and it is the possible result of variables A, and B. You need to look at the independent causes A, and B, but also the interaction AB on E. (I offer the crude example of “attractiveness of date” = Horniness + Beer + (Horniness X Beer).” Each of the three have a statitistial probability, p, and by conventional practice, only variables with a probability less than five persent, p<0.05, are called "significant." The paper’s authors correctly place greater emphasis on the interaction effect, (Horniness X Beer). So, any paper they reviewed that didn’t make enough effort to examine the interactive effects was rated as “ERROR, Will Robinson, ERROR!” (Actually, I fully agree). But, here is the short form conclusion from the original article, “Are all these articles wrong about their main conclusions? We do not think so.”

” Are all these articles wrong about their main conclusions? We do not think so."

Before I continue with the stupid, dishonest, or lazy Mr. Hoven, I want to just spend a few electrons on what the real scientific paper had to say. It is interesting. Most researchers in medicine like to keep things very simple. I was a professor of medicine, but not a clinician- I am a scientist. The sort of people who make good clinical workers (or at least good medical students) mostly don’t like things that are abstract. So, I found that presenting research results as a series of “if … then …, if not … then …” decisions was very successful.

The “keep it simple” extends into the presentation of research statistics, to the overall detriment of the research. From the actual, original research this right-wing, fundamentalist jerkwad has mangled, out of thousands of published articles from five major journals, only 513 even fit the selection statistics criteria. Of these, in only

… 157 of these 513 articles (31%), the authors describe at least one situation in which they might be tempted to make the error. In 50% of these cases (78 articles), the authors used the correct approach: they reported a significant interaction. This may be followed by the report of the simple main effects (that is, separate analyses for the main effect of training in the mutant mice and control mice). In the other 50% of the cases (79 articles), the authors made at least one error of the type discussed here: they reported no interaction effect, but only the simple main effects, pointing out the qualitative difference between their significance values (for example, vehicle infusions were associated with a statistically significant increase in freezing behavior; muscimol infusions were not associated with a reliable increase in freezing behavior).”

Lets review those numbers, thousands of papers published, only 513 even had data that fit the topic. Of that fraction, only 157 had data that might be analyzed with an AB interactive effect, and of those, the “correct” analysis was used half the time. So at MOST, there were 15% of studies in a very narrow subdiscipline of neurology that used statistical methods that were weaker than recommended by the study authors.

That is way fucking better than I would have expected.

What Randall Hoven stupidly wonders is,

“So how much can we trust an NAS study that is a study of studies, when half of those underlying studies contain a major error? “

So, OK. Hoven fails to do even a minimal check on sources. Even an dumb undergraduate should know that you do not cite papers you have never even read. The article’s real position that I quoted above was on the first page of the Nature Neuroscience article, and it did not require any statistical, or scientific background to understand. Basic reading comprehension would have been adequate to grasp,

”Are all these articles wrong about their main conclusions? We do not think so.”

But, he expects us to apply his ignorant version of the Nature article to the NAS Institute of Medicine study on vaccination. And, he concludes that his kids (and his reader's kids) shouldn't be vaccinated.

What a dumb ass.

Randall Hoven IS either stupid, or a liar.

Hoven writes for the rightwing rag “American Thinker.” A superb example of how this creature from the far-right ga-loon is not in any way a “Thinker” is his September 22, 2011, article called “Science for Stupid Idiots.”

I think he might have got that one part correct- he might have been referring to his rightwing pals as “stupid idiots,” in which case he was admirably direct and perspicacious. On the other hand, it could be titled “Stupid Idiot Mangled Sciences,” depending on your assessment of Mr. Hoven’s intellect and honesty. I put it low.

He makes a general attack on science, but takes particular aim at medical literature on vaccinations, dietary salt, physics/cosmology (dark matter, Big Bang), global warming, brontosaurus, museum aircraft displays, evolution, Steve Gould’s “Mismeasure of Man,” and the CERN search for the Higgs particle.

He might have had some valid points on museum airfoil displays, and Steve Gould. I don’t care. I’ll take on the rest of his bullshit in the order that he dropped it.

Starting with his anti-vaccination screed,

“Here's my thinking on a vaccine, before injecting one of my kids with one: what are the chances of harmful effects without the vaccine, and with the vaccine? I want two numbers. My nutty logic is that I want to minimize the chances of harmful effects on my child. To calculate that for a particular vaccine, I need those two numbers. An emotionless robot or computer would need those two numbers. Yet we are rarely given even one of those numbers, much less both. Not from my doctor. Not from the CDC. Not from geniuses who write articles about how dumb I am for not simply believing their repeated assurances. They tell me it's all about informed consent, but they don't inform me (with the two numbers I need), and they don't ask for my consent. (Sometimes you can opt out, but try that with Hep B shots for your kid.)”

The reason why this is apparently reasonable, but is really stupid will follow.

Case in point: a recent press release from the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS told us that "few health problems are caused by vaccines." That report was then used to tell idiots like me, "For Pete's Sake, Go Get Your Kids Vaccinated Already!"

The NAS did not put a number on "few." Even if it did, that would be only one of the two numbers needed. In fact, the NAS explicitly said it doesn't have those two numbers. It said this about its study committee. “It did not examine information that would have allowed it to draw conclusions about the ratio of benefits to risks.”

So the NAS cannot draw conclusions about the single thing of importance to a parent. But somehow everyone else can. You see, "fact-based" people can draw conclusions even where the NAS can't. And therefore, you are an idiot to not vaccinate your kid.

If you want us to be fact-based, you ought to provide us some facts.”

So, let us be so bold as to give Mr. Hoven some facts. In fact, we will give him facts from the very reports he either never bothered to read, or was too stupid to understand. (Alternately, Mr. Hoven is relying on the stupidity of his readers to cover for his, or he is lying). The first fact is that the 800 page full report is freely available on-line, and if Mr. Hoven has problems with the press release, he should read the full report. But, even the six page short form “Brief Report” is enough to show Mr. Hoven, and us why he is either stupid, or dishonest (Is morbidly lazy an option? Maybe).

I wouldn’t want Mr. Hoven to suffer from eye strain, so not only will I limit my comments to the Brief Report, I’ll only need Mr. Hoven to look at a single page of the six, the one with Table 1.

Can Mr. Hoven see why he is either dishonest, stupid, or morbidly lazy?

I’ll point it out.

The worst that can happen to a child, or adult receiving one of the vaccinations studied, is no greater than the risk of having the disease! I’ll rephrase, there is not any additional risk to receiving a vaccination compared to having the disease, and vaccinations will protect millions and millions of people without any adverse effect at all. The key provision is that nearly a majority of people will need to be vaccinated. And this is where Mr. Hoven stands out. People can freeload on vaccinations. Granted that vaccinations have less average risk than the pre-vaccination disease rate over a population of people, they cannot be made entirely risk free. If nearly everyone is vaccinated against a disease, then the disease cannot reproduce itself with enough social density to be a general danger. A freeloader like Mr. Hoven lets everyone else assume the risk and they count on taking all the advantage.

Right-wingers like Mr. Hoven want us to assume the risks for him, and absorb the costs for him, so he can get a free ride and then complain about how he is oppressed.

What a crooked dumb ass! And what a typical right-winger!

I continue my remarks regarding Mr. Hoven's lack of ability in Part II.

A new addition to the speciation list

The list of new species documented in the act of evolution, "Emergence of new species," has grown by a newly emerging species of Sparrow.

A recent publication, “Hybrid speciation in sparrows I: phenotypic intermediacy, genetic admixture and barriers to gene flow” (JO S. HERMANSEN, STEIN A. SÆTHER, TORE O. ELGVIN, THOMAS BORGE, ELIN HJELLE, GLENN-PETER SÆTRE, Molecular Ecology, Volume 20, Issue 18, pages 3812–3822, September 2011) adds another observed example of a new species that has been documented emerging. What makes this particular example interesting is four fold. First, it is a bird species, and vertebrate examples are less common than plants, or invertebrates. Second, it resulted from a hybrid between two similar species which has not been considered a likely pathway to speciation in vertebrates. Third, the researchers have been able to identify the actual genetic differences between the three species. Finally, the event is incomplete, and still in process.

Beware False Piety

(Note added 18, Sept. As of this morning, all of the formerly blocked comments at the Juneau Express were put on-line in an al-at-once data dump. No explanation was made).


Someone named Charley Larson wrote a letter to the Juneau Empire news paper. As I often do, I responded to the newspaper’s public forum. By 16 Sept. 2011, I became so frustrated with the Juneau Empire comment policies (disappearing posts critical of creationism), that I decided to put the whole file up here at Stones and Bones.

I was nearly finished with Charley anyway.

You can read Charley’s letter at this link.

I’ll start with Charley Larson’s letter by detailing the errors and outright falsehoodsin the order they were made.

“the theory of evolution is absolutely a belief. It has never been proven”

First, for those of us who actually do science, in the field, or in the lab, evolution is not a ‘belief’ in the sense of a faith. I accept the reality of evolution just as I accept the reality of gravity. In fact, evolution is easier to understand than Einstein’s theory of gravity, and is better supported. The physics people are spending billions of tax dollars a year hoping to demonstrate the existence of the Higgs particle that might, if found, fill the gap between Einstein’s theory, and quantum mechanics following Niels Bohr.

We don’t need billions to confirm evolution because this was done long ago. We do still argue about the fine points, most of which would seem incoherent to a non-specialist. The two newest big research areas are in evolutionary developmental biology (old school “embryology” brought up-to-date with modern molecular biology), and epigenetics, the surprising discovery of non-genetic phyletic inheritance (really, the odd ways that the environment alters genetic expression)((Even the egg has an internal environment!)).

But, for most of Darwin’s theory that is still retained we only need to point out that new species have been documents emerging from old species. This “proves” evolution as well as falling off a cliff “proves” gravity. I have compiled a list of observed speciation events at “Stones and Bones: Emergence of New Species”


Charley next spouts we should all go see, “No Intelligence Allowed” by Ben Stein.

It is a movie about many scientists who, through their varying research into a diverse array of scientific fields, have found such complexity and variety in what they were researching (their scientific search for the truth) that they came to the conclusion that what they found simply could not be a result of time and/or chance.“

I have already posted a link to “Expelled Exposed,” the propaganda film was titled “Expelled” Here is the link again:
http://www.expelledexposed.com/

First thing to notice is that no scientist lost their jobs because they became creationists. The closest in “Expelled” was Guillermo Gonzalez. He became a creationist, and stopped writing grants, and never got his students to graduate. He lost his job. I was a professor, and IF I did not bring in the $$ from grants, and IF MY students couldn’t graduate, I would have lost my job too.

But the biggest fraud is that these twerps came to reject science because of their scientific research. They were all creationists first. In fact many went into science just to try and disprove the sciences. An example is Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells. He admits that he was ordered to pursue a degree in biology by his “messiah” and “Lord” Rev. Sun Moon. Why? Well, in his own words, “that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism.” That is so unbiased and filled with the “search for truth,” don’t you think?

I am going to expand a bit on Charley’s rejection of “time and/or chance.” Creationists like to pretend (lie) that evolutionary science relies entirely on “time and/or chance,” or as they like to say “blind random chance.” We don’t

First we note that energy and matter have some very dependable, and limited behaviors. This is good because if energy and matter could act in any sort of random way, then literally nothing could exist. So, first of all, we scientists rely on the fact that energy and matter are not totally random. But, if energy and matter were too restricted, then life could not exist. Think about this as the difference between a snowflake and a protein; the snowflake is unique, and elaborate, but its ability to change and adapt to the environment is very limited. A protein is not at all unique, proteins vary greatly, but they have recognizable patterns across hundreds and thousands of different species. Proteins vary even within a single cell, and they are affected by the environment more than a snowflake. Snowflakes are not alive.

But, there are some strong “chance” features to the history of life on Earth. For example, is was not a “planned” event that sent a massive asteroid crashing into the Earth 65 million years ago leading to the extinction of millions of species. If it were not for evolution, all life would have ended long ago. But, evolution causes life to try to fill any available niche, from alpine lakes to super-salty lagoons, and mountain tops to the deepest sea trenches, ice fields to hot springs. Your body has three or four times more cells of bacteria, yeast, and fungi than “you.” And, they all have viruses of their own.

What evolution does not due is to plan in advance. In that sense, it is up to chance. But that is balanced by natural selection which is the opposite of chance.

Charley next claimed “While many of these scientists have not embraced the notion of a supreme, omnipotent God who created the universe, they do believe that the universe is not the result of chance but at the very least is the result of intelligent design.”

It is not true, Charley.

I already showed how Jon Wells’s first allegiance was to his ordained master, Rev. Sun Moon. But here are some more that the Intelligent Design Creationists have admitted;

Phillip Johnson
"This [the intelligent design movement] isn't really, and never has been, a debate about science, it's about religion and philosophy." World Magazine, 30 November 1996

"Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." American Family Radio (10 January 2003)

William Dembski,
"Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." (“Signs of Intelligence,” 1999, Touchstone magazine).

"My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ." William Dembski, 'Intelligent Design', p 206

“…but let’s admit that our aim, as proponents of intelligent design, is to beat naturalistic evolution, and the scientific materialism that undergirds it, back to the Stone Age. “DEALING WITH THE BACKLASH AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN version 1.1, April 14, 2004”

Charley slings some more BS from “Expelled.” And again, these lies are all exposed at, “Expelled Exposed”
http://www.expelledexposed.com/

Some highlights are; Nobody was fired for their beliefs. Some people were not rehired after they refused to do their jobs. Go tell your boss that you don’t need to do your job because you “answer to a higher power.” Then whine about “discrimination” if you lose your job.

Charley described a scene from Expelled, “The very last scene in the movie has Stein interviewing Richard Dawkins, probably the best known atheist in the world. Under intensive questioning from Stein, Dawkins ultimately states he really doesn’t have a clue how life originated on Earth but then postulates that perhaps a super intelligent alien race from a far off planet came and planted life on Earth. This explanation makes far more sense than a creator we call God.”

Sorry Charley, that wasn’t the last scene. The last scene was Ben Stein talking to a faked audience at Pepperdine Bible University. The phony interview with Dawkins was a set-up. All the non-creationists interviewed were lied to by the production company. They were lied to about the title, goal, and funding of the movie. And the “intensive questioning” was faked. Did you notice Charley, that you never saw Stein and Dawkins through a whole question/answer series? And when Dawkins mentioned “intelligent aliens,” he was repeating an old Discovery Institute talking point that they didn’t specify that God was the Creator because it could have been intelligent aliens.

Additionally, the origin of life is logically, and factually separate from the origin of life. Even Darwin wrote in a 1871 letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker, "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed. "

Later in the same letter, he observed,

"It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter."

We do think today about the origin of matter, Cosmology, and the origin of life, Abiogenesis. I have compiled a short outline of recent research called, “A Short Outline of the Origin of life,” at;
http://stonesnbones.blogspot.com/2008/12/origin-of-life-outline.html

Beware intellectual pride? Beware false sanctity.

Charley, ignorant of what science has discovered, and can hold as physical facts, the stones and bones that teach us the history and present state of the Earth, quotes to us the Bible. I’ll quote a bit for Charley who likes the Apostle Paul;

In Titus 1:14, Apostle Paul (or one his later followers) tells us to ignore Jewish fables. Wouldn't that mean much of the Pentateuch, if not all of Genesis? Elsewhere Paul wrote, Romans 7:6, “But now we are delivered from the Torah, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.” Also: 2 Corinthans 3:6 "He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant--not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." This is an powerful rejection of bibliolatry and literalism. This is extended in Titus 3: 9, "But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and strife and disputes about the Torah, for they are unprofitable and worthless."

But the earlier biblical sages also wrote regarding the physical creation as a testament.
Psalm 19:1 The heavens are telling of the glory of God;
And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.
2 Day to day pours forth speech,
And night to night reveals knowledge. (New American Standard Bible)

More clearly, Psalm 85:11 reads, “Truth springs from the earth; and righteousness looks down from heaven.” The Hebrew word translated here as “truth,” emet, basically means “certainty and dependability.”

The certainty and dependability, the emet of the Earth is that it is ancient, and that life evolved.

For some readings from serious Christians, written largely for Christians struggling with the facts of science and their faith, I recommend reading;

Young, Davis A., Ralf F. Stearley
2008 "The Bible, Rocks and Time: Geological Evidence for the Age of the Earth" Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press

Miller, Keith B. (editor)
2003 “Perspectives on an Evolving Creation” Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing

Frye, Roland Mushat (editor)
1983 "Is God a Creationist?: The Religious Case Against Creation-Science" New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, Inc.

16 Sept. 2011

Charley says that, “I also take exception to Olson’s characterization of my Christian belief of creation as “folklore.”

There are several issues here. First, the Christian part of the Bible calls the creation story part of the Bible, "… foolish controversies and genealogies and strife and disputes about the Torah, for they are unprofitable and worthless" Titus 3: 9. There are also the many “Christian” traditions which are in fact borrowed folklore, Christmas for example. The flood story was adapted from older Sumerian, and Babylonian traditions. For a very good book on the origins of most of the creation accounts in the Bible, see;

Smith, Mark S.
2002 “The Early History of God 2nd ed.” Grand Rapids: Wm B Eerdmans Publishing

Charley argues that because his drug addiction was “cured” when he became ‘born again” that this lends credence to Christianity. There are of course billions of people in other religions who could make the same argument. And there are no doubt millions of drug, or alcohol abusers who have always been fervent believers in what ever religion they grew-up within. And, their addiction, or illness, or death should neither be used as a “proof” nor “denial” of the validity of any religion.

One last note, and I might be criticized as being insensitive, but Charley, Why in the world would I take the opinion of someone about the sciences who can only offer their 30 years of drugged stupor as a recommendation? Sorry Charley, I am glad you are sober, but don’t try to criticize sciences you know nothing about.

Seriously Folks. The Fishing Is Getting Better.

I was on the Pacific Queen (good boat, good crew) the other day. We did alright, but my timing was pathetic; either too quck or too slow. I landed the two tuna I hooked, but I missed setting the hook in six others.

Gadget Template Meltdown

Once again, some programer has "improved" the blog software. This is the same as saying they screwed it up again. The pattern seems to be that the "improvement" will take a week or two to be repaired.

News about Climate

The other day (August 27, 2011), someone calling themselves “ThomasPaine1” was yammering abut global warming on a newspaper comment section for The Ithica Times, and citing an article in the well respected scientific journal Forbes. The article was written by James M. Taylor of the Heartland Institute. These are the same biostitutes that promised that “real science” “proved” that tobacco smoking and nicotine could never kill you. They were well paid by the tobacco industry to say that, and their lies undoubted contributed to the deaths of many people. Today they take their money from the oil and coal industry, and they promise to earn that money just like they earned the tobacco industry money.

The original article that Taylor was referring to was, Spencer, Roy W.; Braswell, William D. 2011. "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance." Remote Sensing. 3, no. 8: 1603-1613. It is available free on the Internet.

It should be needless to say, but is apparently necessary, the article does not say what Mr. Taylor claimed it did. Oh, and global warming is real, and tobacco smoking will cause your death. I propose that all conservatives become very heavy smokers to prove that the Heartland Institute is telling the truth.

Now there is a follow-up

In a very surprising action, the Editor-in-chief of Remote Sensing, Wolfgang Wagner, has resigned from the journal. In his resignation letter, Dr. Wagner observed that,

"With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements, e.g., in a press release of The University of Alabama in Huntsville from 27 July 2011 [2], the main author’s personal homepage [3], the story “New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism” published by Forbes [4], and the story “Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?” published by Fox News [5], to name just a few."

True to a conspiracy theory mind set, Climate Change Denier Roy Spencer (and lead author of the disputed paper) blames the "IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] gatekeepers" for Wagner's resignation. He apparently is unfamiliar with people acting honorably.

Boiled Creationist with a Side of Hexaglycine: Sarfati on Imai et al. (1999)

This was the first article critical of a creationist argument I ever wrote. It was published online in 2001 by John Stear for "No Answers in Genesis. I have disabled most of the links, since most were dead anyway.

In an Answers in Genesis web article titled Hydrothermal origin of life? Jonathan Sarfati manages to write three pages about a single five page original peer reviewed paper Elongation of Oligopeptides in a Simulated Submarine Hydrothermal System published in the magazine Science by Imai et al. (1999), and to make over seventeen errors of fact, emphasis or interpretation. What is sad is that it will take a longer paper than either of the preceding to point out the errors made by Sarfati.  This is why very few scientists would bother to reply. Not bad, even for a fanatical creationist. Sarfati titles his piece, 'Hydrothermal origin of life?' but it barely speaks to this topic at all, since he excludes most of the existing literature. For the convenience of the reader we will follow the same headings as used by Sarfati.

Abstract and Introduction
Let us start with the first sentence in Sarfati's abstract -

'Some Japanese researchers have claimed to prove that life could have arisen in a submarine hydrothermal vent'.

Two errors and one questionable word use in just one short sentence! First, not all of the research group were from Japan. Second, nowhere in the refereed article Imai et al. (1999) was there the assertion that their paper proved that life originated in hydrothermal environments [one of the research team did make a similar statement in a newspaper interview given to Elaine Lies of Reuters news service, but more on that later]. And one must wonder why Sarfati was so insistent on the presumed ethnicity of the research team, so much so that he overlooked that André Brack is French. I could have overlooked this had Sarfati not reiterated that the researchers were non-westerners in his fourth paragraph which he opens with -

'Five researchers in Nagaoka, Japan, claimed to have simulated such conditions in a flow reactor'.

Again we see that Sarfati presses his concern with ethnicity and continues the pejorative use of the word 'claimed'. I would say to anyone who might seek to defend Sarfati by pointing out that the research was conducted in Japan, why then did Sarfati not say, 'An international team of scientists working in Japan...'? In the same pejorative manner, Sarfati continues to use quotation marks in what can only be a rhetorical effort to detract from the content of the Imai et al. (1999) paper. 

The last sentence in Sarfati's abstract is -

'High temperatures would degrade any complex molecules over the alleged geological time.'

While it is possible that Sarfati could be referring to Lazcano and Miller (1996), who estimated that the existence of hydrothermal systems in the early Archean could limit the time available for the origin of life to approximately a ten million year interval, Sarfati is clearly not referring to Imai et al. (1999). There is no sense that 'alleged geological time' is invoked by the refereed paper, but the fact that the Imai et al. (1999) paper is clear evidence that this was not the case and that Lazcano and Miller must also modify their position, should be obvious to even a naive reader. 

So just for openers we can reject Sarfati as a careful or competent reader. Before we are off the first page, barely beyond his abstract, we see that Sarfati cannot read the list of authors, or their professional affiliations, rhetorically uses pejorative language, and fails to understand the basic facts of the article under his examination. The news release Sarfati later quotes also clearly identified Brack as French, precluding the defence that Sarfati was confused by other sources. 

Sarfati offers us an unintended bit of humor in just the second sentence of his article:

' ...such an organism could barely repair DNA damage, could no longer fine-tune the ability of its remaining genes, would lack the ability to digest complex compounds, and would need a comprehensive supply of organic nutrients in its environment.'

What strikes me as amusing is that, apart from the fact that DNA is not considered a likely feature of the first organisms (Nelson et al. 2000, Nesbit and Sleep 2001) and that the phrase 'could no longer fine-tune the ability of its remaining genes' is nonsensical, this is an excellent description of the theoretical first organisms which are proposed to be very simple Chemohetrotrophs (Lazcano and Miller 1996, Dyall and Johnson 2000). I think we can score this as two and a half errors. 

In Sarfati's second paragraph he invents a new kind of energy, 'undirected' energy, which he informs us is destructive rather than constructive. One must assume that in whatever Universe Sarfati belongs there is some sort of directed energy that is purely constructive.  Our universe has energy, only energy, and at the molecular level under discussion it is neither directed or otherwise.  In the case of hydrothermal systems energy is expressed as heat and pressure. 

Pressure is an important feature of the reaction kinetics of hydrothermal systems, a point that Sarfati omits in either a purposeful or an incompetent manner in the third sentence of the second paragraph -

'The idea is that the heat can help synthesize polymers...'.

Energy in the form of heat in the absence of high pressure will indeed prove to be largely destructive. ^[1]

Hydrothermal Vents

The second section of Sarfati's paper is titled, 'Hydrothermal Vents'. I think it is obvious to anyone familiar with the origin of life (OOL) research literature that a single, four page article can hardly contain the 'Hydrothermal origin of life', and can at best add or subtract a tiny feature of the growing theoretical edifice of hydrothermal vents and OOL literature. For those who are familiar with this area of science, it is enough to note that Sarfati fails to refer to any of G. Wachershauser's papers (or those he has co-authored), or those by E. L. Shock and his colleagues, on the hydrothermal system contributions to the origin of life, to realize that Sarfati's title is at least incompetent. ^[2] Sarfati fails to add any conditions to hydrothermal vents that could justify his use of the word 'claimed' as in 'Five researchers in Nagaoka, Japan, "claimed" to have simulated such conditions in a flow reactor.' This is notably the primary reference to Imai et al. (1999). 

What follows is Sarfati's very incomplete three sentence summery of the Imai et al. (1999) experimental procedure and anyone who is interested in the actual experiment or its results will need to read the original paper.

Experimental Results
Sarfati's five sentence presentation of the Imai et al. (1999) results is as ill informed as his understanding of their experimental method. The first sentence merely informs us that Sarfati thinks the 'most spectacular results' were the production of tetraglycine and hexaglycine in the presence of CuCl₂. Sarfati is completely wrong when he states that 'The Cu⁺2 ions catalyzed the formation of tetraglycine... '. The actual scientists note:

'The presence of copper ions seems to have prevented the hydrolysis of tetraglycine. The tetraglycine therefore reentered the reaction region and further reacted with a glycine, producing a diglycine, a triglycine, or a diketopiperazine molecule when the amount of tetraglycine becomes sufficient.'

This is significant because Sarfati continues his misrepresentation of the experiment's results by noting that -

'...the product with the highest yield was the cyclic dimer, diketopiperazine, which peaked at about 1% yield, then dropped.'

What really happened was that about five minutes into the experiment which produced hexaglycine, diketopipazine peaked at about 1% and was about to begin to be consumed by the production of hexaglycine. From about five to nine minutes into the experiment, sharp drops in the amounts of diketopipazine and diglycine are observed at the same time as hexaglycine is first detectable. The amount of reactants naturally continues to decline as they are consumed in the production of the larger molecules, particularly hexaglycine.  At the end of the data collection period reported, thirty minutes, there is so little remaining glycine that the reaction is effectively halted. Had the researchers continuously supplied additional glycine, I'm certain that, based on the chemistry involved, there would have been continued production of the observed oligopeptides.

This is far, far different from the results as misrepresented by Sarfati. In fact nowhere does Sarfati even mention the experimental results under the nonacidified conditions. I score this as four errors of fact or interpretation.

Sarfati's Assessment

Koichiro Matsuno gave an interview to Elaine Lies of the Reuters News Service on the occasion of the publication of the Science article. In that article, Matsuno gives the quote reproduced by Sarfati:

'Man has been asking "what is life" for thousands of years. But the real question is where did life begin,' Matsuno told reporters. 'For 10 years, underwater hydrothermal vents have been thought to be the place where life began and we were able to prove it.'

The entire Reuters article is available.

Sarfati asked if this statement was justified by the results reported in Imai et al. (1999) and his answer was, 'No!'

Our answer as well is no, for reasons that I will return to later, but without the exclamation mark. This might surprise some readers, but no, Matsuno has not proven where life originated. Now, it will come as no surprise that this is virtually the only point of agreement I have with Sarfati's diatribe.  For example, Sarfati thinks that Matsuno is speaking -

' ...based on evolutionary faith... '

which is merely an attempt by Sarfati to falsely portray science as a 'religion'.’ A simple explanation for Matsuno's enthusiasm, based on my personal experiences with scientists, is that lab bench scientists and theoreticians typically exaggerate the significance of their work in the popular press as it facilitates (they imagine) their future funding prospects. Another contributing factor is that one really can't get away with that kind of grandstanding in the scientific literature, as scientific reviewers, unlike news reporters, are selected for their relevant expertise in a given area. And so, the opportunity to wildly expand the scope and significance of one's research under the questioning and encouragement of a reporter can be overwhelming.   Finally, Matsuno, a physicist, may truly feel that his statement is correct in the light of his research. The exact boundary between complex chemistry and the origin of life is after all more philosophical than physical.

Sarfati offers the reasons that he rejects Matsuno's grand claim of discovery under four bullet points. These are a predictable mishmash of misunderstood science and selective quotes.

1)  Sarfati thinks he knows what the concentration of glycine was on the prebiotic Earth, and eventually offers an out of date (1984, re-issued in 1992) reference to a creationist work in his support. The cited reference, and Sarfati, are oblivious to different mechanisms of abiogenic amino acid synthesis and concentration that have been demonstrated since 1984. These mechanisms are mentioned in Imai et al. (1999). A fairly extensive reference list is given in their footnote #5, and so were available to Sarfati. Additionally, Sarfati's use of the obsolete estimate of glycine concentration is directly contradicted by Amend and Shock (1998) also referenced by Imai et al. (1999).  As a further observation, we note that the reaction mechanism demonstrated by Imai et al. (1999), is based on the recycling of reactants in the hydrothermal system. Under these conditions the absolute concentration of reactants is less critical than the number of cycles. By increasing the concentrations of the reactant glycine, Imai et al. (1999) merely minimized the amount of time needed to produce the resulting oligomers. As seen in their results shown in Figures 1and 2, the major reactions took place in less than 30 minutes by which time the amount of monomer glycine dropped too low within their closed system to rapidly generate additional product. Nor does Sarfati calculate (or seem aware of) the abiogenic production of glycine produced within the hydrothermal system by mechanisms following from Horita and Berndt (1999).

Sarfati follows with another complete non sequitur -

'Also, any glycine produced would be subject to oxidative degradation in an oxygenic atmosphere.'

First, there is no issue with the generation of glycine; the abiogenic production of amino acids has been established back to the first spark chamber experiments of Miller (1953) and Miller/Urey (1959), and many additional reaction mechanisms since then as referenced above. Second, there is strong data that the early Earth had a reducing, or minimally, an anoxic atmosphere so that 'oxidative degradation' could not occur (Hunten 1993, Kasting 1993, Kump et al. 2001 among others. For a contrasting opinion see Ohmoto 1997, and for a direct counter argument to Ohmoto see Holland 1999. For a biochemical study see Des Marais 2000, and for some further theoretical considerations see Dismukes, et al. 2001, Lasaga, and Ohmoto 2002). Further, even had there been a merely anoxic atmosphere, and ocean for that matter, reductive reservoirs would be at least as common as they are today in hydrothermal systems. Why, imagine that!  Even today with an Earth oxidised by billions of years of photosynthesis, hydrothermal systems are strongly reducing to neutral.  Sarfati suggests in a footnote that the -

'The "strongest evidence" for an anoxic ancient earth atmosphere is that we know chemical evolution took place, and this would have been impossible with oxygen present!'

And he gives two references from the 1970s (one which he did not even read in the original) which use this line of argument, (for a more recent exploration of this reasoning see Hill, 1998).  Oddly, Sarfati calls this a use of circular logic.  There are two points to be made here; first there is ample direct evidence for a reducing to anoxic Hadean and Early Archean which Sarfati must be aware of (the reader need only consult the references offered above) and second, this is not an example of circular logic.  Finally, there is no such thing as an 'oxygenic atmosphere' although one could read Noll et al. 1997 for a discussion of the UV production of ozone on extra-terrestrial ices.  Indeed, this ozone leads us to Sarfati's next blunder. 
Sarfati tries to cover the fact that his 'oxygen the destroyer' story fits science fiction better than science fact with the argument that if the presence of oxygen didn't destroy nascent life on Earth, then the absence of oxygen, in the form of ozone, would. It would seem to be impossible to lose an argument like that wouldn't it? A real 'heads I win, tails you lose' sort of deal. Unfortunately for Sarfati, reality intrudes again. In Noll et al. (1997) for instance it is learned that an atmosphere with less than 10% of the Earth's current oxygen level could have as much as 25% of the Earth's current ozone. Further, without any free oxygen, or ozone, there are several additional means available that could have protected early macromolecules, and life itself. For example, Cleaves and Miller (1998) observe that the prebiotic organic compounds in the oceans would easily absorb the UV radiation flux during the Archean (when the Sun produced less heat [IR radiation] and more UV than today). Earlier, Sagan and Chyba (1997) had shown that methane photolysis could have provided an effective ultraviolet radiation shield for the Earth and prevented, or minimized global glaciation. However, a third model exists, the occasional impact melting of frozen oceans on the early Earth (early to middle Archean approximately 3.9 Ga to 3.5, 1Ga=1 billion years before present) which provides oceanic organic chemical concentration, and an impact heat sink in addition to UV protection of prebiotic chemicals by ice (Bada et al. 1994).   Indeed there is strong evidence that these processes could have begun during the Hadean as early as 4.4 Ga (Sleep and Neuhoff 2001, Wilde et al. 2001).

Still clinging to a feeble argument that low glycine abundance could somehow interfere with oliogomerization, Sarfati introduces ' ...adsorption by clays, precipitation or complexation [sic] by metal ions, or reactions with other organic molecules... ' as available mechanisms that could draw down the available stocks of glycine. This is rather funny. Just what does Sarfati think the products of these steps might be? For instance, the absorption of abiogenic organic molecules on K-feldspars (Parsons et al. 1998), or calcite, which also addresses one feature of the pointless homochirality argument Sarfati will soon turn to (Hazen et al. 2001) have been proposed mechanisms for the abiogenic production of polypeptides leading to the origin of life.  Maybe Sarfati would prefer (Ni,Fe)S complexes which takes us right back into the original hydrothermal literature (Huber and Wachterhauser 1998, etc.). There is a massive literature on the clay montmorillonite and its probable contribution to the origin of life (eg. Ferris and Ertem 1993, Ferris et al. 1996). And the most ludicrous is Sarfati's complaint that glycine would form peptides, or even polymers with 'other organic molecules', when his fourth objection to the Imai et al. (1999) results is that they have only examined the production of oligomers.   I repeat, 'just what does Sarfati think the products of these steps might be?' Sarfati, in trying to deny adequate stocks of glycine to Imai et al. (1999), which we have already seen is irrelevant, has retreated into advocating the proposed origin of life chemical reactions of many other researchers he has attempted to refute elsewhere.  Is this why he has failed to provide these references for this part of his failed attempt to refute Imai et al. (1999)?

2)  Sarfati's next issue with the newspaper statement by Matsuno separates into three parts. Sarfati in his first sentence of this section claims that hydrothermal dynamics would be harmful to 'other vital components of life', even while admitting that the experiment adequately represented the hydrothermal chemistry of glycine. This is complicated. The original authors, Imai, Honda, Hatori, Brack and Matsuno do not go so far, as they explicitly point out some of the ways that their experiment does not reflect realistic Hadean or Archean hydrothermal conditions. Also, Sarfati has changed the field of the discussion by abandoning Imai et al. (1999) to move on to a discussion of RNA and high temperatures. This is an interesting problem which could warrant an extended discussion. But this is not germane to the results of Imai et al. (1999) and would ridiculously extend this already long paper. Second, as if the stability of RNA was not distancing enough, Sarfati also makes a technically irrelevant reference to chirality which makes one erroneous statement and seems to merely provide Sarfati the opportunity to reference himself again. An idle entertainment at a conference is to see who is able to identify the well known cell membrane protein gramicidin A by its structure of alternating L- and D-amino acids (an activity preferably conducted in the conference hotel's bar). Finally, Sarfati wishes us to ignore the results of Imai et al. (1999) because they have not done the experiment that Sarfati judges is 'incomprehensible' to have not been executed. Actually, Sarfati should take this issue up with the funding sources rather than the experimenters. It is worth noting that Imai et al. (1999) reference Amend and Scheck (1998), who's thermodynamic analysis indicates that at least half of the twenty essential amino acids, also the most common, should react similarly to cytosine under the conditions used by Imai et al. (1999).

3)  Sarfati begins this bullet point with an odd sentence, 'The longest polymer (or rather, oligomer) formed was hexaglycine'.  Imai et al. (1999) never refer to any product of their experiment as a polymer. So who is Sarfati correcting? It would seem that Sarfati is correcting Sarfati. Could there be any other reason than appearing erudite that might explain Sarfati creating an error, 'polymer', so that he can correct it '(or rather, oligomer)'? Next, Sarfati compared hexaglycine with the structure of enzymes. Imai et al. (1999) nowhere claim to have produced enzymes, nor do they compare their products to enzymes. Sarfati needs to decide if he is criticizing a newspaper interview, which hardly needs the folderol of a 'research' article, or is he trying to make some response to a peer-reviewed paper in Science? As a response to the paper published in Science, Sarfati's effort is far short of adequate.

4)  By point four, Sarfati is largely repeating himself. Unfortunately he is repeating his own errors. The first sentence allows us to watch Sarfati misapply the term 'homo-oligomer'. The word 'oligomer' means a polymer of up to five units of the same monomer, with the root 'oligo' meaning scant, and by definition monomers are restricted to simple molecules which are the repeating units of a polymer. A 'homo-oligomer' is found where two to many copies of a complex macromolecule polymerize. A web search on 'homo-oligomer' contrasted by a similar search on 'oligomer' will easily return sufficient examples to clarify this to the interested reader, or one can consult a good dictionary. Next, Sarfati incorrectly asserts, 'But life requires many polymers in precise sequences of 20 different types of amino acids'.  Indeed it is the very fact that there is considerable imprecision allowed in living systems that makes evolution possible, and neither is it true that all 20+ amino acids are involved in all polymers associated with life. And next, 'Thus Matsuno's experiments offer not the slightest explanation for the complex, high-information polymers of living organisms'.   Well of course it does, by empirically demonstrating an effective set of reactions which lead to the abiogenic formation of a complex molecule.

Conclusion

Sarfati concludes with an irrelevant quotation which I will ignore. I will conclude with a short explication as to why, in spite of my complete disdain for Sarfati's incompetent treatment of this topic, I agree that Matsuno's newspaper interview statement that, 'For 10 years, underwater hydrothermal vents have been thought to be the place where life began and we were able to prove it', is incorrect, and is not supported by the results in Imai et al. (1999). There is a considerable amount of work on the contribution of marine hydrothermal vent systems to the origin of life, some of which has been referenced in this short paper. Hopefully an interested reader may follow these references to the current thinking in this issue.

But, no one should expect to find a definitive answer to the question, 'Where did life begin?'. For, even if a bench chemist should derive (perhaps I should say create) a set of self replicating molecules which assemble into a cell, they will not have demonstrated how life originated on the planet Earth some three to four billion years ago. Not even should their created cell have characteristics closely similar to some extant Archaea will this demonstrate how life originated or where this event occurred. Such a demonstration, if possible, will lay in the field of paleo-geochemistry. The laboratory studies are of critical importance as they lead us to search for particular chemical and isotopic signals from the past which unless alerted to we might miss. Still, in the final analysis, it is in the rocks that an OOL hypothesis will stand or fall, just as it was geology and paleontology which first provided the scope and physical evidence to sustain evolutionary theory. 

[1] This omission of high pressure effects on macromolecule stability is also found in Levy and Miller (1998) which Sarfati uses in support of his attack on Imai et al. (1999). Miller and his colleagues also make the same omission in Lazcano and Miller (1996), and Miller and Lazcano (1995) on theoretical grounds. Miller and his colleagues all wrote prior to Imai et al. (1999) and based their conclusions on either computational methods or limited experimental data. For a properly considered opinion of the relative contributions of pressure and heat to macromolecular stability consult the references in Note #2, particularly Shock (1990). This only increases the significance of empirical studies such as Imai et al. (1999) as theory generally must give way to data.