On AntiEvolution.org, “midwifetoad” presents us with the following Challenge, in response to Bill Dembski’s posting at UcD where he refers to a variety of websites to ‘explain’ the similarities between the XVIVO rendering of Kinesin and the one found in “Expelled”… You be the judge…
Dembski Wrote:Following the discovery of the kinesin in the late 1980s there were investigations into the locomotion method used for propulsion giving two models with one being an “inch worm” model and the other being the “hand over hand” model. We illustrate the hand over hand mechanism in the transport of a vesicle.
A variety of papers, micrographs, illustrations and animations with depictions of the cellular transport system of kinesin were used and are freely available on the internet. We invite you to learn more about this incredible little transport engine through the following links:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/ne[…]of-1210.html
http://www.stanford.edu/group/block[…]kinesin.html
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/b[…]rts_bmm.html
http://www.umich.edu/news/MT/04/Fal[…]ml?molecular
http://www.esi-topics.com/nhp/2006/[…]irokawa.html
http://bioweb.bio.uci.edu/sgross/Na[…]Nanotech.htm
http://www.goldmanlab.northwestern.[…]tcartoon.gif
http://www.goldmanlab.northwestern.edu/intro.htm
Who’s your daddy?
![http://www.goldmanlab.northwestern.[…]tcartoon.gif](http://www.goldmanlab.northwestern.edu/images/iftransportcartoon.gif){kind=link}
Duh, the Answer is “K” - GOD!
If lawsuits have already been filed, it’s now up to a judge to decide. No amount of internet appeal is going to help these guys now. It would be perfect if a flaw could be found in the Harvard animation that had been copied into the DI version, especially if it were a flaw unique to the Harvard video. Man, what a dramatic example of common descent with plagarized errors that would be. Then everyone would become familiar with the argument.
The similarity is chiefly in respect to the composition as a whole, not the trivial details. It is obvious that the Expelled animation was influenced by the XVIVO composition. I can think of many other ways to set up the kinesin animation without slavishly imitating the XVIVO animation’s composition. Our research group makes those kind of decisions all the time in creating animations.
Picasso: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” To “steal” the Expelled animator would have to made an original composition to rival the XVIVIO animation. Clearly this was just a “copy.”
Mark Mathis *could* have made a thoughtful discussion of ID (though I doubt it), instead he chose propaganda and demagoguery.
Judge or jury yes, however, the question is more towards Dembksi’s ‘argument’ that somehow the Expelled Video excerpt may be based on commonly available alternative examples of kinesin.
Particularly in light of Dembski’s earlier comments
and
OT: Expelled Exposed is back online.
Excellent news.
Not flaws per se, but every depiction of a complicated biological process leaves certain details out for simplicity - and, what do you know, the Expelled video left the same details out!
Somewhat ironically, this is a situation where the ‘Design Filter’ which works so unreliably in rarefied design can be applied more successfully, noting of course that such an application really predates the ‘design filter’ as proposed by Dembski.
What is more ironic is how ID proponents seem to argue that it was regularity and chance, not design that ‘explains’ the similarities.
And surprise surprise, per Dembski’s comment, the producers apparently used the same music, establishing that they were well aware of the XVIVO source. Somehow we should be thankful for Dembski’s ability to assist his opponents in establishing their case :-)
Dembski is never right so that is a good sign that something is drastically wrong. I’m surprised he hasn’t filed a report on XVIVO with Homeland Security yet. Or did he? LOL
Discovery is where the truth will out. The Expelleds will have to show each and every step in how they produced their animation. Godditit or “We found it” isn’t going to work.
If they started with the XVIVO video and disguised it, they are going to be in trouble
Destroying paper and electronic documents is obstruction of justice. Lying under oath is perjury. Both are criminal offenses. The lawyers for XVIVO will try to get the foot soldiers and small fry to turn on the heads. They should take it the deal, Dembski, Miller, Ruloff, Mathis, et al.. aren’t worth being a martyr for.
Looks like there is a jurisdictional issue as well. XVIVO is in Connecticut. The Declaratory Judgement brief should have been filed in the relevant federal court, not in Texas.
Never underestimate the ability of Dembski to “help” the cause of ID. Alas, if he had only testified at Dover ; )
From the logical underpinnings of intelligent design, by Dembski, I quote
Even more ironically, Davescot makes the following “argument”
And since Davescot and ID argues that there are no false positives in design inferences, they either have shown that there is a design inference in this case, or that the filter indeed is prone to false positives.
Well done
Davescot then continues to “argue”
PS: Plagiarism is defined as “the use of another’s information, language, or writing, when done without proper acknowledgment of the original source.” However, the critical element of it is the final part. The one thing that ties all plagiarism together is going beyond merely duplicating the work, but also not crediting the source and thus taking the material for yourself.
Source
Another poster “Atom” recognizes the meaning of plagiarism
Whose side are they on I wonder?
Oh and Davescot again
The statement that the EF is designed to reject false positives however is a flawed one as has been documented many times.
I’d like nothing more than to see Dembski on the stand, having to defend the Disco Institute’s and “Expelled” producers’ actions on these issues. The fact that he has gone around in so many circles with his documented online arguments is just grist for the mill.
I envision something occurring much like what happened at Dover with board member Bill Buckingham. The man got caught lying on the stand, caught up in many of his own stated contradictory arguments, and started to gibber nonsensically about how “he’s human and makes human mistakes.”
And then after the fact he trash talks the judicial system. Nice.
With friends like Dembski & Buckingham, the ID-creationists should be asking themselves “Who needs enemies?”
Since a lawsuit that will kick their collective asses is now in the works, they are now on the side of saying any damned thing they can to cover themselves.
It won’t work. They’ve finally bitten off more than they can chew and they’re going to choke on it. You don’t steal intellectual property from Harvard and get away with it.
It would appear Dembski is a little rattled. In another thread he arrogantly assumes that the editor of Scientific American is insufficiently qualified to pass judgment on ID;
Obviously a degree in Biology and a career in science writing is trumped by two PhD’s (neither scientific) and a career in theology. Hmmm, educated and he still doesn’t understand the concept of ‘laughing stock’ (Maybe his buddy, ‘Daves Cot’ could explain it to him)
Ever since Dembski sent out his Waterloo email, which caused him to be ‘expelled’ from Baylor, his track record of “foot in mouth disease” has been quite remarkable.
Could this entire own goal be a setup, could it all be a cunning plan by the wise folks at the Discovery Institute ?
Suppose the creationist folk happen to get a pliable judge who might use the words “Design Inference” at some point in his judgement. That might be the biggest triumph those people have got in a long time. The headlines would read like “ Design Principles Used by Court - just like the other sciencey thingies”. Losing a copyright case and ordered to pay costs would look pretty small by comparison.
Even if he loses badly, without his scientific breakthroughs being accepted by the legal system, all is not lost for the Isaac Newtons of today. Dr Dembski could claim that the judge found that both videos were products of separate intelligent designers; the second video did not evolve naturally from the first by random mutation and sexual selection.- so why cant it be true for red squirrels and grey squirrels?
Wow, the hypocrisy is so thick you can’t even see through it!
More documentation and grist for the mill - keep it coming Dumbski.
Yeah, just like what happened to them at the Dover Trial was part of their “cunning plan”?
That’s like kicking someones ass by repeatedly hitting them in the fist with your face.
WATERLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO leroy
But what else is there to do, impugn them with arguments? That would be ‘pathetic’
Ah yes, those pesky ‘details’
It looks like Premise is admitting they used the XVIVO video to make theirs. A poster “lowell” on PZ’s blog found this in the Declaration.
Seems like they are saying they didn’t use the XVIVO video but if they did, it was just lying around on their website so they took it.
Bad sign when they can’t keep their story straight.
Fascinating, for profit use now becomes educational use.
Besides the vesicle transport and music, ERV is busy recording other cases of plagiarism in the animations, such as the actin network (from Inner Life) and the RNA transcription (from PBS). (The PBS animation was ultimately made by Drew Berry at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia for the production company, according to John Wilkins.)
As a commenter there noted, when a plagiarist gets trippin’, he’s rippin’ from many sources.
Concerning this recent finding, is there still a way to claim that a documentary film like Expelled, which is being released for profit, falls under the fair-use protection for “educational purposes”, or is Premise Media just blowing (more) smoke?
Fair use becomes a tricky argument once profit is involved.
PLAYJARIZM: U R DOING IT RONG!!11
But there’s no way the Expelled *jazz hands* crew copied this. They must have created a completely original animation.…..which depicted exactly the same process.…..in exactly the same way.…..using exactly the same shapes.…..from exactly the same angle.…..simplified by leaving out exactly the same details.…..and making exactly the same mistakes. But it’s a different color, so it can’t be the same animation (that the Dishonesty Institute was previously caught stealing)!!!111one!
Isn’t that the explanation excuse Dumbski used when he got caught using it (badly overdubbed) in his paid lectures?
So the easy way out for Premise is not charge money to see the movie!
I obtained a copy of the complaint and in addition to paragraph 54, it adds other claims as well such as the fact that there are a limited was of portraying these scientific phenomena and that they independently created the work.
As I said, discovery will be fun
Therefore, there is a controversy about kinesin transport within the scientific community. We have compiled a list of 100 scientist that have signed the following statement, “We are skeptical about the ability of kinesin to explain the complexity of intra- and extra-cellular transport”. We need to expose our children to the true transport system in biology, IT. The theory of intelligent transport states that intra- and extra-cellular transport are best explained by an intelligent transporter.
I’m sure there is no possibility that Harvard has even one lawyer that can measure up to the lawyers representing the producers of Expelled. We all know that the Harvard School of Law is a joke, you don’t even need a GED to get into their night-school program.
Don’t forget …using the exact same music. After all the music was integral in demonstrating kinesin transport.
Dave’s just jealous because he doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
And how could they even claim “educational use” of the original video with a straight face if they actually DIDN’T use the original video? They made a cheap knockoff, and no permission was given to do that for ANY purpose.
Oh, yeah, they’re just lying again. Not that that’s anything new. What was that about bearing false witness?
Surely you jest? He’s such a font of knowledge!
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No, no, there’s no way they’d steal the soundtrack too. They must have created a completely original score.…..using exactly the same notes.…..in exactly the same order.…..played on exactly the same instruments…
See, the very idea that they would steal something (that they’d been caught stealing before) is absurd! It’s all just a coincidence!
Remember that these are part of a list of arguments. Maybe one will ‘stick’?
Actually, “However, do notice that they both have roughly the same layout and the same elements in view; this is a remarkable, umm, coincidence, since these are highly edited, selected renderings, with many molecules omitted … and curiously, they’ve both left out the same things.
Another curious coincidence: you’ve heard of the concept of plagiarized errors, the idea that the real tell-tale of a copy is when it’s the mistakes that are duplicated, in addition to the accuracies. In this case, I previously criticized the Harvard video for a shortcut. That kinesin molecule is illustrated showing a stately march, step by step, straight down the microtubule. Observations of kinesin show it’s more complex, jittering back and forth and advancing stochastically. That’s a simplification in the Harvard video that is also present in Expelled’s version.
It’s clear that what they did was brainlessly copy what they saw in the original. I don’t know whether this is actionable anymore — that they slapped together a look-alike video to cover their butts makes the issue much more complicated.”
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/[…]in_expel.php
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Davescot said: There is no way Premise can claim that. There’s a clear, unambiguous design inference that doesn’t require a rocket scientist to evaluate. Bolinski’s claim is bulletproof. The Explanatory Filter is designed to reject false positives and it works.
Are those guys showing their work, or are they just throwing the words “explanatory filter” and “design inference” all over the place whenever they feel like it? Lol.
In the discovery phase of the lawsuit, the Expelled studio will be asked what documents they consulted to create their video, what were the scripts, and to show the footage that was created but not retained for the movie.
It is clear to us that the main “document” used was the XVIVO video, and that the only animation footage created was the XVIVO rip-off (nothing original created, then rejected). The design inference work strongly against the Flunked people.
The problem with DaveScot’s notion that the “explanatory filter” is of any use here is that we actually know who the designer is before it is even employed. There is no assumption that there is a super-natural designer involved with this fiasco at all. In this case we know that XVIVO designed the original because they released their animation first and took credit for it. The second copy was still designed by XVIVO, the design was just ripped off by the producers of Expelled and Premise media. All the designers, and plagiarists in this case are amenable to investigation as they are natural entities (should be a fun investigation in a court of law). Not to mention, all known animations are the result of human design.
Perhaps we should investigate the complex specified information of each animation to see if both could have arisen independently by chance and natural law. The probability is pretty low (might as well be zero) that the second animation isn’t just a shoddy copy of XVIVO’s. (Sorry, I can’t bring myself to use Dembski’s bad math to actually calculate the probability).
Just a point of note folks. If you’re looking to link on a blog in order to get the NCSE Expelled Exposed website a higher Google ranking, you should heed this advice…
http://forums.randi.org/showpost.ph[…]postcount=10
Bottom Line:
Do not use “Expelled Exposed” as your anchor text! (The anchor text is the visible text in a link). We need to get it moved higher in the Google rankings for when people search for the the movie. That means searches that have “expelled” in them but not “exposed”.
So, for example, like this: Expelled :)
Back to your regularly scheduled thread…
That is exactly what Davescot is doing. There is no explanatory filter, no specified complexity, no irreducible complexity. They are no more meaningful outside the UD echo chamber than is the snark.
The value of Davescot’s comparison is that it reveals how beneath the surface they still think of evolution as heading towards a target. That’s why they see our calculations of the probability of the two videos being so alike, as analogous to their calculations of [pick your attribute of nature] occurring. They can’t seem to grasp that it is analogous to anyone winning the lottery, rather than the odds of you winning it.
Me thinks two things: First, somebody better take a screen shot of the IDots lair (Uncommon Descent) before they purge the record of admitted nefarious deeds.
Second, I think they may be trying to weave some sort of argument that by the detection of purposeful copying on their part, we admit the crux of their argument. Apparently, two different videos could not have become so similar by chance, an intelligent being must have done it. See? ID is true.
Jackasses
I think it is also telling that they have budgeted for lawsuits. Clearly, they were expecting to be sued by someone (whether that is XVIVO or the estate of John Lennon). Which kind of implies that they knew they were using copyrighted material without permission (and without acknowledgement).
Still, who needs to obey the law when Jesus is on your side?
Oh, wait, hang on. ID is supposed to be science, not religion, isn’t it?
Everyone, repeat after me:
It’s not really lying if you’re Lying For Jesus&trade:
If we consider of online roulette like a game of possibility wherein the player can’t influence the effect of the spin, establishing an on the net roulette method will probably be very difficult to establish. That doesn?t, nonetheless, mean there is none being had. Reviewing the betting odds for or against a specific outcome is often a great begin.
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