Is the Placenta a 'Problem'? No, Ann, No.

https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/is-placenta-problem-no-ann-no.html

I'm writing this in response to an article someone brought to my attention, https://evolutionnews.org/2016/06/the_placenta_pr/. Now, I would normally write a critique of such an article, but I found that someone has already written a good one. It is @
http://marmotism.blogspot.com/2016/06/gaugers-gaffe.html. My own page on ERVs and placentae is @ https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/ervs-are-essential-in-reproduction.html

The picture is of the writer of the Evolution News piece, Ann Gauger, styled as "Director of Science Communication and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture, and Senior Research Scientist at the Biologic Institute in Seattle, Washington".

Only things are not always what they seem. She is posing in front of a green screen, which is then used to produce a shutterstock background depicting a real laboratory. See https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/inteliigent-design-think-tanks-institute-is-a-shutterstock-image/ The Discovery Institute is a propaganda site for the pseudoscientific idea of "Intelligent Design". They have discovered precisely nothing since their founding in 1990, wasting a great deal of donors' money. Their propaganda organ is "Evolution News & Science Today, which is rarely news, and not always about evolution. Its evolution related output is about trying to attack and discredit evolutionary science. The "Biologic Institute" is, or rather was, a sham institute. A fake. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biologic_Institute 

This is cargo-cult science at its most polished and mendacious. https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/kkk-kreationist-kargo-kult-science.html

Gauger has a Ph.D. from the University of Washington Department of Zoology, but like the Ph.D. signatories of various creationist "statements of faith", she has turned her back on science. 

"By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information." - From the Answers in Genesis Statement of Faith, written by someone who thinks he is infallible and possesses all information, apparently.

Acceding to this statement is tantamount to abdicating your positions as a scientist. Regardless of whether or not you have scientific qualifications and a track record of scientific achievement, to relinquish the basic scepticism inherent in the scientific mindset is to relinquish science. Deciding on an outcome and seeking to promote it, whatever the evidence actually suggests, is an anathema to science. Indeed, we gain confidence in scientific ideas precisely because we seek to destroy them, rather than shield them from examination. The fact that they withstand testing is the way in which we gain confidence in their veracity. If creationist ideas were true, they would not need to be corralled away and protected from examination in this way. To agree to this faith statement is essentially to admit to having no confidence whatsoever in its truth! It should be unnecessary, and it is only necessary because it is fundamentally unsupportable.

I once had a message exchange with Gauger, which I dearly wish I had preserved. We were talking about endogenous retroviruses, and whether they were the products of an intelligent designer, or the products of retroviruses. She asked me to cite the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature, which I did. (https://web.archive.org/web/20230531193743/http://www.evolutionarymodel.com/ervs.htm#References) Her response? She promptly blocked me from further discussion!

Gauger ignores the evidence for ERVs being of retroviral origin, which is par for the course for cdesgn proponentsists. Here is an overview of that evidence. https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/why-do-virologists-and-geneticists.html

If anyone thinks these ERVs were designed, the hypothesis raises a number of questions I list here. https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/in-science-we-apply-principle-of.html. Nobody has been able to come up with any adequate answers. Ann Gauger, if you come across this piece, this is the gauntlet I throw down to you.