Some scientists from this blog attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology recently and came across a poster by none other than Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute. For those who have not attended a scientific conference, a poster is a sort of second-level way of presenting one's research to colleagues at a conference. Most conferences will have addresses from members on various subjects, roundtable discussions in smaller groups, workgroups on professional issues, and a keynote symposium.
In addition, there will be a large hall set aside at some point in the conference for people to present their posters, which are, literally, posters - large framed paper documents with an abstract and a brief description of a research project that has been carried out and the results, or perhaps a project that will be carried out and the expected results. Unlike the official presentations, the posters are generally not vetted via peer review prior to the conference. Typically speaking, anyone who is a member of the organization can present a poster, so the posters tend to vary widely in terms of quality and validity. For a picture of Wells' poster, click here.
Anyway, these folks saw Wells' poster at the ASCB conference, took pictures of it and posted a critique of it on their blog. Their conclusions were not kind:
The poster he presented was entirely fluff - a virtually untestable hypothesis and no data. It was titled in such a way to sound respectable but ultimately unnoticeable...It sounds quite official, until you read it carefully and see that it sounds like one of those 'context free grammars' that are randomly generated to get into scientific conferences.
Or as PZ Myers writes on the Panda's Thumb:
Jonathan Wells has a hypothesis. He thinks that centrioles function as little turbines that generate a force on chromosomes that can destabilize them and lead to cancer; that's fine, I could see where that might be interesting and might be testable. Of course, he also argues that this idea is driven by intelligent design theory, and I don't see that at all. It's a mechanistic hypothesis about current processes in cells, and doesn't say a word about their history, so even if it is demonstrated to be true, there's nothing in it to contradict an evolutionary explanation for its origin.
It's nothing more than a proposal for potential research, without any data or conclusions. And nowhere in the poster does Wells explain why this hypothesis would support ID, as he has elsewhere claimed it does. If you can figure out the connection between this hypothesis and ID, feel free to fill me in because I don't see it. So what was the point of Wells presenting this essentially empty research proposal as a poster at the ASCB conference? Here's a possible hint:
So we now have an outspoken Creationist, sponsored by the Discovery Institute, presenting a data-free poster at a large scientific conference. All posters from this conference are published as a supplement in what would normally be a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It's safe to say that the malarkey he proposes would be ripped apart during a real peer-review. But to the general public, there's little distinction between a supplement and the real deal. So be wary if you start seeing that the Discovery Institute has published its findings in Molecular Biology of the Cell, and that they've presented at ASCB. It's a load of crap designed to look like they're being accepted by the scientific community when in fact they exploited a loophole and flew under the radar.
This could actually become a testable prediction about the DI and their public relations machine. I would be willing to put up a $100 bet that before long, they will be claiming that this ID-supporting hypothesis has been published in a peer-reviewed journal and presented at the ASCB conference somewhere in their literature. Once the journal's supplement is published, with the abstract of this poster included in it like all of the other posters, that will inevitably by cited as an example of a pro-ID paper published in a peer-reviewed journal as a boost to their scientific credentials. Anyone wanna take that bet?
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