Comment by agentcoops
4 days ago
I fell into a rabbit hole when I was looking for coverage of a recent relatively technical biological result and the most prominent Google results were from 'evolutionnews.org' aka 'scienceandculture.com', run by the 'Center for Science and Culture.' Imagine my surprise to find this is all run by a 'Discovery Institute' with tens of millions in funding dedicated to pushing 'intelligent design' and behind the campaign to have anti-evolution views taught in public high school science courses.
Not of course to say these outfits are behind the decline in science reporting, but it's a real tragedy how difficult it is to find actual and competent scientific journalism today, a tragedy that makes the job of such charlatans all the easier. I'm glad that Quanta Magazine seems to be doing well enough, which certainly isn't perfect but I've read some good articles from them.
Out of curiosity, what was the result in question? The director of the DI is a molecular biologist and I've seen his name attached to a paper that reported a pretty humdrum technical result about... (actually checking my notes) the statistical improbability of enzymes arising by purely random assemblage of unrelated protein folds.
that's not humdrum, it's carefully cloaked pseudoscience.
The conclusions as stated in the paper seemed valid, and the methodology seemed to check out, it was just inconsequential; abiogenesis doesn't posit that chemical processes are purely random. The real problem is that creationists were parading the astronomically low probability cited by the paper as evidence that enzymes must have been intentionally constructed.
Now imagine that this is being used to train LLMs. Then fed back to users.