[meteorite-list] NASA Finds New Life Form

[Chris Peterson]

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" <joshuatreemuseum at embarqmail.com>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
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.