Where Have We Heard That Before?

While all antievolution depends upon previous expositions for the concepts and arguments, most of the time each new generation of antievolutionists takes up the burden, light though it is, of expressing past arguments in their own words. Like the game of “telephone”, this sometimes has the effect of adding novel distortions to the already-existing falsehoods.

Now, though, it looks like it isn’t enough to copy from stuff one published previously if one is an antievolutionist looking for a peer-reviewed paper credit. One may as well do some outright copying of the work of others, if it will help get a paper past the reviewers. This is, of course, behavior indicative of folks who cannot generate enough intellectual wattage to raise a spark of their own.

Enter the following publication, as cited by McDonald:

Warda, J, and M. Han. 2008. Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence. Proteomics, Epub ahead of print.

They plump for “a mighty creator” as a “more realistic” cause of certain phenomena in proteomics. Along the way, they lift text from others without proper attribution.

P.Z. Myers announced the issue on the Panda’s Thumb recently, linking to this PDF that lays out just how much of the paper in question was acquired via copy-and-paste rather than research. It’s a lot. Where I got my doctoral degree, somebody turning in a term paper with that sort of plagiarism apparent in it would be out the door, with the assist of a large boot applied forcefully to their posterior.

So, is the corrosive moral influence of antievolution what drives these people to cheat like they do?

Why are we, at this late date, even thinking about extending a presumption of any sort of legitimacy to the antievolution movement? They talk big about “fairness”, but every time we turn around, they are pulling stunts like describing themselves as “top scientists” to congress, suborning bishops via public-relations firms, seeking “compromise” language that lets them slip in the same old arguments into classrooms, gaming university dissertation committees, gaming the Amazon review system, proposing kickbacks to schools to up the box office for movies, and getting editors to personally bring manuscripts safely through “review” processes. This does not sound like any sort of group with a claim to having a moral mission to accomplish, unless they think that more bad morals are needed in the populace at large.