There was a Royal Society meeting that I mentioned rather disparagingly — it was on extending the neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis, as presented by people who didn’t understand the neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. I wasn’t there, but Carl Zimmer was, and he gave a fair summary of the criticisms of the presentations. Zimmer has always been a first-rate science journalist, and I wish we had a few hundred clones of the guy.
Susan Mazur is someone I’ve described as a journalistic flibbertigibbet who never met a crackpot critic of evolution that she couldn’t fluff up with sensationalist hyperbole. She loved Stuart Pivar’s work. She hyped the Altenberg 16 meeting. She doesn’t seem to understand any biology at all, and is not interested in learning any — she seems more concerned with getting the approval of ‘controversial’ flakes, in the forlorn hope of being the first to report on radical breakthroughs.
Mazur also reported on the Royal Society meeting. Or at least, as Larry Moran explains, she reported extensively on the presence of Carl Zimmer at the meetings. You want to see white-hot professional jealousy screamingly displayed, go read her post. It’s embarrassing. Would you believe she wrote a whole book, Royal Society: The Public Evolution Summit, about the meeting before the meeting? Now she’s bitter that she can’t get her stories about the Paradigm Shift she predicted would take place published, and she’s particularly bitter that mainstream, consensus critics of her imaginary revolution presented at the meeting. How dare they ruin her innovative auto-da-fé?
Somewhat surprisingly, she’s particularly irate with all the Templeton-funded scientists who presented there.
Ten of the 26 presenters were part of the John Templeton Foundation-funded Extended Synthesis project. Templeton is known for its pairing of science and religion. And as the talks proceeded, it appeared to some in the room that the JTF-funded scientists had both compromised their work and retarded science by accepting the foundation’s easy money.
That sounds like something I’d say, except that her complaint is that those scientists, by accepting the mediocre science
of modern evolutionary theory, were acting contrary to its [Templeton’s] “spiritual” mission.
. I know, we’re in the bizarro world.
Mazur only found a few things she like about the meeting, and of course they were the weirdest, farthest-out proponents of the wrongest ideas: James Shapiro and Denis Noble.
James Shapiro, the other bright spot of the RS meeting, highlighted themes from his book, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, regarding symbiosis and hybridization and waded into the water on viruses, talking about their role in formation of the eye and the placenta. I addressed a question to Jim Shapiro about stem-loop RNAs (viruses), which Shapiro said he was “challenged by.”
…
The other notable conference news was Denis Noble citing the embryo geometry paper of Stuart Pivar, who was seated in the room between wife Larimore and co-author David Edelman and elegantly dressed in a black velvet jacket for the occasion. Pivar has faced fierce criticism in the past regarding his evolutionary perspective, particularly from the PZ Myers pack, and so welcomed Denis Noble’s recent invitation to publish in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, one of the journals Noble co-edits. Noble is also listed on the “advisory panel” for Pivar’s new web page: urform.org.
With so much exciting evolutionary science now openly accessible online, it is disappointing and most peculiar, that this meeting about supposedly “new trends” squandered an important opportunity to deliver that to the public and instead served largely to reinforce standard thinking on evolution.
Well hello, pack! You got a shout-out!
You know, if Carl Zimmer were writing this kind of summary, he’d explain what stem-loop viruses are, maybe actually say what challenging question he asked, and he’d note something other than Pivar’s choice of a jacket. This is exactly why Mazur is such a horrible writer about biology.
But just for an example of really bad journalism, read Mazur’s 2000 word hate-rant against Carl Zimmer. Be like Carl. Don’t be like Susan.
Is a promotion or demotion from “Horde”?
OMG, Mazur is Trump-ish. This is quoted from PZ’s last link above:
But where did she go to high school?
Do we have a poll that says she is the most winningest journalist ever? Does she have the best brain? Does she have all the golden and best words?
Proud member of the PZ Myers pack here.
We’re practically famous.
Some possibilities for the mysterious question:
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A polite response would be the reported “that’s challenging” rather than the more succinct “you’re a loon.”
I think ‘pack’ is what the business world would call a lateral move from ‘horde’.
Ravening sounds so much better when paired with horde though, so I’ma stick with that.
Also raving, ravishing (enchanting), and remarkable.
Abso-tively. Carl was a model of self-control, providing a very balanced report of the meeting where he rather objectively emphasized the views of the many “careerist” presenters, along with relatively little material from those providing rebuttals. Relatively less of that simply because there were fewer dissenters in this crowd. We can tell though, that the rebuttals were far more effective, and we can also tell what side Carl was on. But again I can only admire him for simply reporting on what happened. That is class. Can you tell that I like this guy? Yes. Yes, I do.
Mazur wrote:
When one deplorable insults another deplorable, I just smirk? jazzhands?
@2: She’s name-dropping *Omni* to boost her science cred? SRSLY? I read exactly one issue, in the late 70s. Even as an engineering undergrad, I could see it was, at best, science-lite, with a mix of gee-whiz speculation that would probably never pan out.
Pack? I must be really behind the times. I thought we were ilk.
Was this before or after Lynn Margulis became a crank?
stevewatson @6 – same here.
Nobody gives a shit what happens at conferences.
the only thing that matters is what gets published in the journals.
Ravening Horde… Slavering Pack…
meh, either works.