I'm not defending the quality of the paper, only making a distinction
between incomplete or poor quality science, and "junk science". The paper
may fall into one or both of the former categories; I don't think it falls
into the latter. As I noted, the hypothesis is a sound one, and this work is
sure to generate additional research along these lines. Junk science does
not.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with the first sentence you quote. I can't
imagine any well educated biologist having a problem with it.
Chris
*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "JoshuaTreeMuseum" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 10:07 AM
Subject: [meteorite-list] NASA Finds New Life Form
According to that vast repository of all human knowledge, the modern day
Library of Alexandria; Wikipedia, junk science is defined as:
Junk science is a term used in U.S. political and legal disputes that
brands an advocate's claims about scientific data, research, or analyses
as spurious. The term may convey a pejorative connotation that the
advocate is driven by political, ideological, financial, or other
unscientific motives.
The term cargo cult science was first used by the physicist Richard
Feynman during his commencement address at the California Institute of
Technology, United States, in 1974, to negatively characterize research in
the soft sciences (psychology and psychiatry in particular) - arguing that
they have the semblance of being scientific, but are missing "a kind of
scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds
to a kind of utter honesty".
Check out their first sentence:
" Life is mostly composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen,
nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur and phosphorus. Although these
six elements make up nucleic acids, proteins and lipids
and thus the bulk of living matter, it is theoretically
possible that some other elements in the periodic table
could serve the same functions."
This would be news to my freshman biology 101 professor who taught that
the bulk of living matter was composed of water and carbohydrates.
If you read the paper, they talk a lot about impurities in the salts and
reagants. (!??!) They talk a lot about how you can grow this bacteria by
feeding it arsenic and how the arsenic is assimilated into its
biomolecules. They analyze lots of extracted fracionated nucleic acid. As
for showing that the arsenic actually replaces the phosphorus in the DNA
helix.......not so much. Their evidence for this is weak and cold fusiony.
I quote: "Show me the money!" and: "Where's the beef?"
I can only conclude that this research is motivated by a political
hype-driven agenda to get funding during the Great Recession. This isn't
sound science, it's press conference science. I don't really blame them,
things are tough all over and NASA needs money to conduct their important
work. It's just that you can only yell "Wolf!" so many times.
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