Science marches on...

[Insp. Clue!So?]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/scienc...70&emc=eta1

’55 ‘Origin of Life’ Paper Is Retracted

Librado Romero/The New York Times


By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: October 25, 2007
In January 1955, Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, published a paper called “Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life” in American Scientist, the journal of Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society.

In it, Dr. Jacobson speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, “one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.”

Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. But today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want — from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention.

So after 52 years, he has retracted it.

<snip>

Meanwhile, religion marches backwards:

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3093806.ece

Padre Pio 'faked his stigmata with acid'
By Peter Popham in Rome

The Independent
Published: 25 October 2007

Padre Pio, the friar with fingerless gloves whose image is found on a million Catholic key chains; who was canonised before 200,000 ecstatic pilgrims five years ago, was a charlatan who deliberately mutilated himself with acid to give the appearance of bearing the stigmata of Christ,
according to evidence to be published next week.

The Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto will release Padre Pio, Miracles and politics in 20th century Italy * a book producing new evidence from Vatican archives, which he says proves that the charismatic friar secretly procured
carbolic acid with which to burn his hands, feet and sides.

The allegations are not new: two successive popes regarded Padre Pio as a fraud. By 1920, when Pio was 33 and was already exhibiting his scars before masses of pilgrims, the church was worried that his cult was spinning out of
control. Reports commissioned by the church claimed Pio regularly scourged himself with a metal-tipped whip, and had sex with women twice a week. For many years Pio was banned from celebrating mass in public.

<snip>

I am informed that the local Bishop of Turin was well-apprised of the fact that the so-called "Shroud of Turin" was an easily-demonstrated fake, executed by a known local con; but despite the cleric's best efforts it lives on centuries later. Faith often involves parsing your beliefs directly against all evidence--don't know why this is considered a good thing.

[Splendour]

Very interesting Inspector. Do you think God had control in the first story while man had control in the second story?

[Insp. Clue!So?]

Let's start with, any particular god? This creature certainly seems to have trouble making it's desires known in any sort of coherent way.

A decent myspace page would be a good start as we have advanced from payprus over the last 2K years.