Pseudoscience by press release

I just had to repost my review of Lifecode because the author, Stuart Pivar, is pushing the book again. Here’s the press release, shocking in its pretentious flapdoodle:

Prominent Scientists Reject Mainstream Genetics, Support New Theory of How the Human Body is Formed

New York, NY: In the foreword to the new book Lifecode, From Egg to Embryo by Self-organization, by Stuart Pivar, (Ryland Press), Darwin scholar Richard Milner* directs attention to the recent landmark ENCODE report (June 14) in which Human Genome Project Director Francis Collins calls the long-accepted model of genetics “badly flawed.” A week later, in a NY Times Science Times report, scores of scientists concluded that, after fifty years of genetic research, they don’t really understand what genes do, or how they work.

Lifecode presents an alternative theory of evolution which contends that the embryo is formed by self-organization, as are crystals, rather than by a genetic code subject to   natural selection. Accompanying illustrations depict hypothetical construction blueprints for the various body forms. Biological Self-organization has long been a contending alternate theory for the code of life; recent proponents include evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Brian Goodwin.

In a review of Lifecode, Robert Hazen calls the model plausible, worthy of publication and further study. Professor Hazen is a leading NASA origins of life scientist at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, DC. Other supporters include Dimitar Sasselov, Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, evolutionary biologist Brian Goodwin, author of “How the Leopard Changed its Spots,” and Neil Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium.

This new theory detailed in Lifecode may also be said to counter Intelligent Design by providing a more cogent account of evolution than does Darwinian natural selection.

Nowadays, I don’t consider an encomium from Francis Collins to be worth much of anything, but he cites some other big names in there … I am highly dubious about any of them. He earlier made a big deal out of Stephen Jay Gould’s support, after Gould was safely dead and unable to question it, and what the book contains is page after page of rank nonsense that Gould would not have endorsed. I’d be disappointed if Hazen and Tyson had recommended the book, and particularly appalled if Goodwin actually liked it—the book is a series of pretty pictures of imaginary embryology taken entirely from the mind of Stuart Pivar and with no support from actual embryology, that is, the stuff we see in our labs in our microscopes. I have a suspicion that their praise is a distortion as gross as the claim that scientists don’t understand genes or how they work.

Pivar is a classic crackpot, and Lifecode isn’t a science book by any measure. There is no theory there, and no evidence or observation. I can’t believe any scientist would be taken in by it.

Lifecode

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I’ve been reading a strange book by Stuart Pivar, LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which purports to advance a new idea in structuralism and self-organization, in competition with Darwinian principles. I am thoroughly unconvinced, and am unimpressed with the unscientific and fabulously concocted imagery of the book.

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Reinventing the worm

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Sometimes, I confess, this whole common descent thing gets in the way and is really annoying. What we’ve learned over the years is that the evolution of life on earth is constrained by historical factors at every turn; every animal bears this wonderfully powerful toolbox of common developmental genes, inherited from pre-Cambrian ancestors, and it’s getting rather predictable that every time you open up some fundamental aspect of developmental pattern formation in a zebrafish, for instance, it is a modified echo of something we also see in a fruit fly. Sometimes you just want to see what evolution would do with a completely different starting point — if you could, as SJ Gould suggested, rewind the tape of life and let it play forward again, and see what novelties arose.

Take the worm. We take the generic worm for granted in biology: it’s a bilaterally symmetric muscular tube with a hydrostatic skeleton which propels itself through a medium with sinuous undulations, and with most of its sense organs concentrated in the forward end. The last common ancestor of all bilaterian animals was a worm, and we can see that ancestry in the organization of most animals today, even when it is obscured by odd little geegaws, like limbs and armor and regional specializations and various dangly spiky jointed bits. You’ll even see the argument made that that worm is the best of all possible simple forms, so it isn’t just an accident of history, it’s a morphological optimum.

But what if we could rewind the tape of life a little bit, to the first worms? Is it possible there are other ways such an animal could have been built? It seems nature may have carried out this little experiment for us, and we have an example of a reinvented worm, one not constructed by common descent from that initial triumphal exemplar in the pre-Cambrian — an alternative worm.

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Gay roundup

This is a nice, short summary of some of the explanations for the evolution of homosexuality. It could be shorter; there are really just two classes of explanation, the adaptationist strategy of trying to find a necessary enhancement to fitness, and the correct strategy of recognizing that not all attributes of an individual organism are going to be optimal for that individual’s reproduction, so don’t even try. Love isn’t hardwired by biology, and it can go in all kinds of different directions.

So I’m saying the best answer in the list is #5. I wouldn’t be biased by the fact that the author is quoting me, no, not at all.

Microsoft launches space program with captured alien technology

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UFO ‘studies’ have come a long way since the days of Billy Meier, when you could just throw a pie plate or a hubcap into the air and take a polaroid, and presto … proof of flying saucers! Now in these days of Photoshop and CGI, you can get much more elaborate and realistic images — none of those silver blurs anymore. DJ Chubakka introduced me to a weird world of modern UFO enthusiasts.

Nowadays you can read the markings right off the hulls of the spaceships.

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The Colorado threats and the despicable slander of the DI

Recall those threats made against evolutionary biologists at the University of Colorado at Boulder? You can read the text of some of them at the Panda’s Thumb now. This is clearly the work of a deranged Christian cultist and creationist kook. We at the Panda’s Thumb also know who the author was, since he didn’t conceal his identity in the letters, and have tracked down his website, and yeah, he’s one of those wacky creationists and a fervent convert to Christianity from Judaism (we are not linking to that information until the police or other sources confirm it).

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I’m surrounded!

Isn’t this a lovely map? It shows the concentration of ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States, with the lighter colors being the most enlightened and the dark reds being the most repressed and misinformed. Oh, it’s labeled as the frequency of religious adherents, but it’s the same thing.

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Religious adherents as a percentage of residents

You can see where I live — it’s in the dark splotch marring the western and southern corner of the state of Minnesota. It says that more than 75% of the people who live here are bible-wallopers — I believe it. On the bright side, I can hope that somewhere around a quarter of the people living here are sensible and unafflicted.

Hey, look — Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia are paler than Minnesota!

The consensus is that this is NOT such a nice map after all. The methodology involved querying a subset of the religious organizations in the country about their membership, which has the dual problem of inflated self-reporting and the omission of religious groups that aren’t part of major national organizations. The general feeling, I think, is that the overall frequency of religious adherents is grossly underreported in major parts of the country.

So it’s not only inaccurate, it hides the magnitude of religious indoctrination.

The Chronicle does it again

They’ve got another article from some fuddy-duddy prof who doesn’t like the 21st century. It seems to be nothing but a long whine about modern teaching technologies — it’s rather pathetic, actually, but the Chronicle seems to have a fondness for running occasional articles from defensive, confused Luddites. Here’s an example:

Besides using the computer more in my classroom, the experts tell me that another way to transform my teaching persona is to put more of my course materials online. I can create a course that’s more user-friendly and appealing to today’s students by incorporating more Web-based elements. That could be as simple as placing my syllabi, lecture notes, and other course materials on my Web site — which would mean that I first have to get a Web site.

I’d say the best way to improve his teaching persona would be to have the snide ignorance extirpated from his brain. That’s not what teaching technology is about, and I’d agree that if you substitute a computer for good pedagogy you lose. But with the right perspective — specifically, that technology is a tool that when used appropriately and with moderation can improve your ability to deliver information and can provide resources to help students get that information — it can help you teach. A fellow who’s stymied at the thought of getting a website probably should not mess with it, though; he’s kind of hopeless. He’s at a university, so he’s probably already got one and doesn’t know it, and the university probably also provides software to simplify putting up simple web pages that, for instance, could archive reading assignments or help him maintain a gradebook.

It’s no sin to not understand modern instructional technology, and lots of teachers can do a great job without it; it is damned stupid to mock teaching technology, though, when you’re ignorant of what it is.

I’ll let New Kid rip up the rest of the article, though. Some days the Chronicle just depresses me — it’s like reading some blue-lettered broadsheet from the 1950s. Hey, maybe they ought to stop publishing it on the web and instead distribute it with a network of hand-cranked presses and stapled mimeo sheets!