[meteorite-list] NASA Finds New Life Form

From: JoshuaTreeMuseum <joshuatreemuseum_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2010 12:07:03 -0500
Message-ID: <980C9F4E559244F88F723F32BD8A1694_at_ET>

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.

-------------------

If you write the word "monkey" a million times, do you start to think you're
Shakespeare? (SW)

Phil Whitmer

-------------------

There is a big difference between "junk science" and science which is
incomplete, or published too early, or even of generally marginal quality.
In the case of this recent work, the hypothesis is sound and the techniques
used are reasonable. Certainly, there is reason to suspect that more work
should have been done before publishing (although that is far from certain
at this point).

I don't know how this will all shake out in the long run. I'm sure that
others will be pursuing similar work, and applying additional tests. In any
case, having read the paper, I don't think this work can fairly be called
"junk science". At worst, it is incomplete.

Chris
Received on Wed 08 Dec 2010 12:07:03 PM PST