Design inference?: The Reuters photoshop scandal and the blogosphere
| August 8, 2006 | Posted by O'Leary under Intelligent Design |
According to Jeff Jarvis of the Guardian,
After Reuters ran a photo last week of black smoke over Beirut, suspicious bloggers noted that smoke isn’t known to rise in incredibly symmetrical bulbous billows. That was clear evidence of Photoshopping, using a tool to “clone” one part of a picture so you can cut-and-paste it over other parts. Someone took this photo, added smoke and made it darker. You can see the before-and-after most clearly here.
The sleuth who proved the hoax was Charles Johnson, the man behind the controversial Little Green Footballs blog and the same man who uncovered the faking of the memos used in Dan Rather’s fateful – for Rather, that is – story about George Bush’s military service. In that case, too, Johnson took the original and the fake the showed how the deception was done by dissecting and overlaying the efforts at technical trickery.
Reuters, however, did not wait 11 days, as CBS did, to respond to the outing. Yesterday, it pulled the photo, apologised, and suspended the photographer, Adnan Hajj.
Now, this is obviously a classic design inference, but the main thing to see is the importance that the blogosphere has assumed in recent years. No longer can legacy media organizations palm this stuff off on a helpless public.
As a journalist friend commented recently,
Contrary to what the MSM keeps screaming, the blogosphere is by its nature self-correcting,. By means of links it provides its own electronic “paper trail”, so that a dubious source can be investigated. Print cannot match this, even with print footnotes, which are cumbersome, slow, & necessarily limited. And TV cannot dream of trying. (We can hardly thank Al Gore enough for inventing the Internet.)
Funny thing: I haven’t found where Al Gore is listed as one the prophets of the Internet, though Canadian Marshall McLuhan is. (My j friend was making a joke.)
35 Responses to Design inference?: The Reuters photoshop scandal and the blogosphere
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“My issue is just as stated- abiogenesis directly impacts evolution for the reason provided.â€Â
CH:
Just so I’ve got it straight, your argument is that you cant say evolution appears to be a goalless process without having a working theory of non-directed abiogenesis?
Nope, we missed each other. What I am saying is you can’t restrict OPEN discussion to only “goalless” and “purposeless” processes in biology without understanding the origin of biological organisms (one or many). Yet that is what is happening.
“In order for that to happen reptiles allegedly “evolved†into mammals.â€Â
CH:
Ok reptiles and mammals shared a common ancestor. This ancestor probably resmebled reptiles a lot more than it did mammals.
Whatever- evolutionism doesn’t predict either reptiles or mammals.
“But Dennett has already told us there is no way to predict what will be selected for at any point in time. Therefore the processes cannot be used to predict anything.â€Â
CH:
For example if we assume one species evolved into another, the mechanisms of evolution put constraints onto what can happen at the molecular level. If we have no constraints we can’t really make many predictions.
But there aren’t ANY constraints on evolutionism. Just throw father time at anything and abbra cadabra we have novel structures- bones from the boneless, for example.
We have no idea what mutations caused what changes. NOR do we know if any mutations can cause the changes required (if life started as single-celled organisms).
From what we do know about what happens on the molecular level an accumulation of mutations may give you a blind pygmy albino with sickle-celled anemia but I wouldn’t pin my materialistic hopes on that observation.
Chris said:
For the sake of clarity, is the ancestor of mammals not supposed to be a “mammal-like reptile”?
I know the popular phrasing is “share a common ancestor” such that nothing in particular ever evolved from anything else in particular, but does the term “mammal-like reptile” not presume this creature to be an actual reptile?
Isn’t that the theory?
Do textbooks not, in fact, say that mammals evolved from reptiles?
http://www.blackwellpublishing.....life23.asp
crandaddy,
Thanks for your interesting response. I just discovered it, and I regret I don’t time at the moment to interact more with you.
No problem, Tom. I’m frantically preparing for a nine-day trip out of state, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to continue a conversation with you anyway. We’ll chat again some other time.
“What I am saying is you can’t restrict OPEN discussion to only “goalless†and “purposeless†processes in biology without understanding the origin of biological organisms (one or many). Yet that is what is happening.”
I personally and many sceintists would like to have a disscussion about goal-directed processes in biology but I am not aware of very many. I have seen ID supporters talking about mechanims such as frontloading etc so I expect they will come up with something and we will be happy to discuss it.
“Whatever- evolutionism doesn’t predict either reptiles or mammals.”
Im not quite sure what you mean, it does predict that mammals evolved from a ancient reptilian ancestor.
“But there aren’t ANY constraints on evolutionism. Just throw father time at anything and abbra cadabra we have novel structures- bones from the boneless, for example.”
I don’t know much about bone evolution, but there are several papers on it. I think the are constrainsts expecially in the fact that there are many discoveries that could be made which would disprove the theory.
“We have no idea what mutations caused what changes. NOR do we know if any mutations can cause the changes required”
Thats what genomics is helping us figure out, although it is generally on a higher level than the individual mutations (eg, change of expresison in gene X) although the reconstruction of ancestral sequences is helping us in that regard.
“For the sake of clarity, is the ancestor of mammals not supposed to be a “mammal-like reptileâ€Â?”
I think the mammal like reptiles are supposed to be transitiona between mammals and reptiles. I think the common ancestor of mammals and reptiles looks very much like a reptile in the same way as the common ancestor of mammals and modern fish will look like a modern fish.