atheisme.eu

October 25, 2007
Scientist Retracts 1955 Errors Now Cited as Evidence by Creationists
Sometimes it can take a half-century to realize you’ve made a mistake. Homer Jacobson, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, learned that lesson when he decided to Google himself and found that incorrect statements he made in 1955 had come back to haunt him.

To make amends, Mr. Jacobson retracted two statements from an article published in American Scientist magazine more than five decades ago. In a letter in the magazine’s November-December issue, Mr. Jacobson said he had made incorrect assessments of how improbable it would have been for processes on the early earth to bring about the first organisms.

Mr. Jacobson said that it is not normal to retract such old errors but that he was motivated because creationists were now quoting his article to support their cause. “I am deeply embarrassed to have been the originator of such misstatements, allowing bad science to have come into the purview of those who use it for anti-science ends,” he said.

Rosalind Reid, editor of American Scientist, applauded Mr. Jacobson in an editorial in the same issue. “Jacobson responded in the noblest tradition of science,” she wrote. The episode is described in today’s New York Times.

In his original article, Mr. Jacobson asserted that it was “utterly improbable, in all the time and space available for the origin of terrestrial life,” for the environment to create a single amino-acid molecule. He now says that statement was based on a calculation assuming there was no external source of energy involved in forming amino acids.

But in 1953, only two years before Mr. Jacobson wrote those words, a young chemist named Stanley L. Miller and the Nobel laureate Harold C. Urey had published a paper in the journal Science showing how lightning could have caused simple molecules to form amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.

Now Mr. Jacobson notes that electrical discharges, such as lightning, and other forms of energy on the early earth could have provided the energy to produce amino acids. His earlier statement “is completely inapplicable,” he said in the letter. —Richard Monastersky

To the Editors:

In January 1955, American Scientist published my article, "Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life" (Vol. 43, No. 1). I ask you to honor my request to retract two brief passages, as follows:

On page 121: "Directions for the reproduction of plans, for energy and the extraction of parts from the current environment, for the growth sequence, and for the effector mechanisms translating instructions into growth—all had to be simultaneously present at that moment [of life's birth]."

On page 125: "From the probability standpoint, the ordering of the present environment into a single amino acid molecule would be utterly improbable in all the time and space available for the origin of terrestrial life."

I have several reasons for retracting the statements. For the first passage, use of the requirement of simultaneity was a conjecture, unsupported by any proof. Separate developments of partial structures might well have occurred in an environment of randomly reacting molecules, eventually to join into one or more self-reproducing structures.

The second passage refers only to an attempt to calculate the probability that a single molecule of a particular amino acid could spontaneously form from its components. The calculation was irrelevant, as it was based on an endothermic change during an imaginary spontaneous conversion of a mixture of component atoms and molecules into glycine under adiabatic and standard conditions, with no external source of energy. Such changes cannot spontaneously take place. Molecules of increased complexity have been found, however, when necessary components are available, with the aid of ambient energy from natural or experimental systems, e.g. electrical discharges, substantial temperature gradients or contiguous compounds or elements whose chemical reactions produce free energy. All of these could have existed under early Earth conditions, and thus this passage is completely inapplicable.

Retraction this untimely is not normally undertaken, but in this case I request it because of continued irresponsible contemporary use by creationists who have quoted my not merely out-of-context, but incorrect, statements, to support their dubious viewpoint. I am deeply embarrassed to have been the originator of such misstatements, allowing bad science to have come into the purview of those who use it for anti-science ends.

Homer Jacobson
Brooklyn College
The City University of New York