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
Epistemology You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals 7 Apr 2010 The song of the title of this post is a catchy and highly amusing piece that suggests that if we’re just mammals we should have sex. It’s sort of a low brow version of Andrew Marvell’s To his coy mistress. Instead of Time’s wingéd chariot, we should do what mammals… Read More
Evolution Evolution in films 11 Nov 2010 OK, I’m giving a lecture on evolution in films. So far I have these: THEM! Godzilla, King of the Monsters King Kong The Time Machine X-Men Fantasia 2001 a space odyssey Mission To Mars Evolution Avatar Ice Age 3 – Dawn of the Dinosaurs Jurassic Park Destroy All Monsters Lost… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity Observing the hot 17 Mar 2008 The ever-interesting blog of Moselio Schachter, Small Things Considered has another post of thought-provoking microbes: hyperthermophiles. These wee beasties live at 90°C in anoxic conditions. I particularly liked the passing comment: Growth and division of these organisms was observed at 90°C under anoxic conditions using a dark-field light microscope (which… 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.