Monday, May 4, 2009

Molecular clock, pseudoscience, and Steven Salzberg

I have left several comments before on Professor Steven Salzberg’s blog:

http://genome.fieldofscience.com/2008/08/t-rex-protein-degrades-further.html

He is a professional in the business of molecular clock and molecular evolution.  But he has a hobby of carelessly calling the research of some scientists ‘pseudoscience’.  (granted that he may have made some good calls occasionally)  I was really surprised to see his aggressive and baseless attack on the dinosaur peptide work of John Asara et al, which I have made use in my paper on testing the molecular clock using fossil sequences. His blog title is “Genomics, evolution, and pseudoscience”.  So, given his ‘expertise’ on both molecular evolution and pseudoscience, I sent a post to his blog the other day to show him why his field, the molecular clock, may be pseudoscience.  But my post has yet to appear on his blog after more than 2 days (he screens all post before posting them and my posts have all went through prior to this latest one).  Most likely, he would not post it.  If he can only be silent to my analysis, it could only mean that he cannot refute it (he would have to be extremely stupid to try to refute it, because it is irrefutable).  If he is a genuine scientist, he would post it regardless whether it is true or false.  So here we have a good joke, an active practitioner of pseudoscience makes it a hobby exposing pseudoscience except his own. I hope he can sleep in peace now that he knows there is at least one observer who knows what a fake he is.  Good luck to him.

 

Below is what I sent to his blog:

 Steven,

I submit the following analysis to suggest that the molecular clock is a candidate for the most outrageous pseudoscience in the recent history of science.  As an expert on both pseudoscience and molecular evolution, you are well qualified to render an honest and impartial evaluation of this analysis.

 Molecular clock at best explains half the story on ‘genetic equidistance’ and at worst explains none. 

(detail omitted here as it is the same as the post of April 30, 2009 on my blog)

3 comments:

Stripe said...

Your posts seem to have materialised. :)

gnomon said...

A link to this blog was found there yesterday but was gone today. Who made that link?

Stripe said...

Don't know. I may have been wrong about your posts being authorised. Have they been?