If you’re disappointed in CNN, you can always turn to MSNBC…ooops, never mind, they’re solemnly reporting on the end-of-the-world nonsense from the Harold Camping Cult. They’re predicting the Rapture will come on 21 May.

I would like to propose a novel version of Pascal’s Wager for the news media. When apocalyptic cults come along and announce disaster and doom, ridicule them. Just rip into them, send your most sarcastic, cynical reporters to cover the story, and just shred all the followers as loons and gullible freaks. There will be two possible outcomes.

One, they’re right, and the world ends. Your business has nothing to gain or lose by taking them seriously before the big event — it’s going kaput no matter what. So have a grand time before the catastrophe and make money with laughter. It’s not as if listening to crazy ol’ Harold Camping will make a bit of difference in your fate.

Two, they’re wrong, and the world keeps rolling on beyond 21 May. We all win! It means your coverage was spot on perfect, and got all the right answers, while the cultists are going to have to go glumly back to living their miserable little failed lives. Follow up with a feature on all the broken-hearted crazies. Start looking for the next mob of nuts to mock.

See? That’s how to handle it. All this sober pandering to derangement gains you nothing.

You just can’t shut this crank up. You may recall that he earlier published a paper in an Elsevier journal claiming that all of genetics is wrong, oh, and by the way, the Quran and Bible are right because chromosomes look like ribs. He has a new paper out (only it’s actually the same old word salad, freshly tossed), Molecular genetic program (genome) contrasted against non-molecular invisible biosoftware in the light of the Quran and the Bible.

The current perception of biological information as encoded by a chemical structure (genome) is critically examined. Many features assigned to the genome are violations of chemical fundamentals. Perhaps the most striking one is that a living cell and its dead counterpart are materially identical, i.e., in both of them all the structures including genome are intact. But yet the dead cell does not show any sign of bioactivity. This clearly shows that the genome does not constitute the biological program of an organism (a biocomputer or a biorobot) and is hence not the cause of “life”. The molecular gene and genome concepts are therefore wrong and scientifically untenable. On the other hand, the Scriptural revelation of the non-molecular biosoftware (the soul) explains the phenomenon of life in its entirety. The computer model of organism also helps understand the Biblical metaphor “Adam’s rib” as chromosome, the biomemory of the cell. The Quran provides ample insight into the phenomenon of human biodiversification. It also reveals the source of biological information required for creating biodiversity in human population. The Scriptural revelation of the invisible non-molecular nature of biosoftware rules out the possibility of creating life from chemical molecules without involving a living cell (or organism) in the process. Claims of creation of “synthetic life” or “synthetic forms of life” employing living cell in the process cannot be accepted as creation of life from non-life as non-molecular biosoftware can be copied from the living cell to the prosthetic cell. Instead of chemically synthesizing a cell from scratch to prove life is a material phenomenon, biologists can as well resort to a more practical and convincing method by restoring life to a dead cell (which carries all the hardware structures including the genome but lacks the biosoftware) by chemical means. The failure of experiments to produce life through purely chemical means or to restore life to a dead cell would in fact invalidate the molecular biological program (genome) concept. More importantly, the failure would confirm the Scriptural revelation of non-particulate nature of the divine biosoftware and the existence of God.

It’s nonsense through and through, and it’s even recycled nonsense — there’s nothing new in here that you can’t find in his previous paper from Bizarro land, except this one seems to emphasize his claim that the impossibility of restarting a dead cell proves the existence of a creator.

The man is a flaming crackpot, but the real shame here is that he is regularly getting published, even if it is in bottom-tier journals. This one was in “Advances in Bioscience and Biotechnology“, which bills itself as an international journal of bioscience, very broadly defined. I suspect it’s a money-making racket. It says “A fee will be charged to cover the publication cost” (which is not at all unusual in science, and many of the very best journals charge a page fee to authors), but it also says the papers “are subject to a rigorous and fair peer-review process”, a claim clearly given the lie by Mr Wahid. This is a paper that could not have survived a cursory glance, let alone a rigorous review.