An unnecessary rebuttal 29 Oct 2009 A paper has been published formally rebutting the single most stupid idea ever published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS(USA)). The story is in Scientific American but the gist is that Lyn Margulis, who sees the world in terms of endosymbiosis, having once correctly argued that eukaryotes like you and your cat, houseplant or fungal infection evolved by the capture of one single celled organism by another, forming organelles in our cells, used a “backdoor pathway” to get a really dumb paper published in that august journal. The paper argued that caterpillars are not, as we had all concluded, merely a developmental stage of insects, but were formed by the hybridisation of velvet worms and butterfly ancestors. That it needed a formal rebuttal is unclear. Not, I think, coincidentally, PNAS(USA) has dropped the editorial-bypassing method of members of the NAS directly submitting papers, which has been long attacked as a way for bad papers to get published in a front rank journal. This will only improve the quality of PNAS(USA). As a metacomment, I find the overblown rhetorical claims for lateral heredity lately to be rather dumb. Despite lateral transfer and occasional hybridisation, it is still a tree at most scales and in most cases. Woese and Doolittle have argued for a mixed (reticulated) base of the phylogenetic tree, but I have yet to see solid clear argument that the tree does not exist since then. It is a case of a scientist with a hammer, and in Margulis’ case, only a hammer… Evolution Politics Science
Politics Taking the veil [away] 6 May 2010 I am profoundly conflicted about European attempts to ban the burqa, that form of dress that covers all of a woman and leaves only a gauze strip for her eyes. On the one hand I think it is dehumanising, enslaving and deeply sexist. On the other, I do not think… Read More
History Harry Potter, you see, is the wrong kind of magician 15 Jan 2008 In an article on the Catholic or otherwise virtues of Harry Potter (didn’t we do all this a while back), L’Osservatore Romano has an article claiming that Harry Potter is the wrong kind of hero. Why is that? Not, as you might think, because there are wizards in it –… Read More
Evolution Prichard on species 9 Jun 2010 Here’s a nice and interesting discussion on how species was seen well before Darwin, which is effectively a “biological”, that is to say, reproductive isolation species conception. It’s by James Prichard, an anthropologist, and published in the second edition of Prichard, James Cowles (1845), The natural history of man; Comprising… Read More
Margulis is an excellent example of a person who does highly respected and important work, and then spends the capital of the respect earned from that work on doing increasingly disreputable things. Rock bottom for her was when she endorsed AIDS denialism. She lost all credibility with me after that. Yeah, fine, you came up with the endosymbiotic explanation for mitochondria and chloroplasts–what else have you done for me lately?
Endosymbiosis is probably slightly less revolutionary than the Principia or Opticks, but we should remember that such a great as Newton was probably about 75% crackpot, 25% scientific genius. Or we could point to Kepler, or Bacon. There’s nothing wrong with calling out a bad theory, but we fell a lot of trees we might we wish we hadn’t when we use this as an staging area for for personal disparagement. As for only having only a hammer in one’s toolbox, it’s woeful, but Margulis deserves her due. Someone like Dawkins has only the selfish gene hammer, which wasn’t even his idea, and which increasing appears to be at best misleading and at worse untenable. But he evades the charge of crackpottery (memes, anyone?), largely because he is so expert (I would say genius) at maintaining a persona of eminent respectibility. We could add to AIDS denialism Margulis’ unfortunate support for the “truthers.” But her status as a revolutionary microbiologist remains. If she sees cooperation everywhere in biology (an oversimplification), it doesn’t discount that she was importantly right about organelles. (Dawkins, meanwhile, sees selfishness everywhere and is lauded for his parsimony). At any rate, Margulis is not the paper’s author, merely it’s advocate. If this paper perpetrates the “single most stupid idea” ever to appear in PNAS, it’s author’s name (Williamson) should appear in your account. Surely writing the piece is the worse sin than failing to recognize it’s shortcomings.
I hate it when people get all reasonable on my rants. Thanks (no, really, thanks 😉 You are right on all counts. But Margulis ought not to have put it forward – anyone can see it’s a very silly idea, and should therefore have been published in Rivista di Biologia. I know, I know… cheap shot. It’s a day for it. I have a cold.
Williamson’s idea was already floated in an article in American Scientist. I gather his theory has been around for a while. I personally found the article down right weird but figured that the editor owed him one and the issue of the evolution of complete metamorphosis is a fascinating one, so I didn’t get particularly exercised about it.