The comparison to jabberwocky is inevitable

Lots of people have been sending me this paper by Erik Andrulis, and most of you have done so with eyebrows raised, pointing out that it’s bizarre and unbelievable; some of you wrote asking whether it was believable, at which point my eyebrows went up. Come on people: when you see one grand cosmic explanation that is summarized with cartoons, which the author claims explains everything from the behavior of subatomic particles to the formation of the moon, shouldn’t you immediately sense crankery?

It’s also getting cited all over the place, from World of Warcraft fan sites to the Discovery Institute (those two have roughly equal credibility in matters of science), so I had to skim through it. I read it with rising concern: Erik Andrulis is a young assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, and he’s published entirely sensible papers on RNA processing. This paper is so weird and out there that it is either an attempt to Sokal the field of origins of life research, or the man is seriously mentally ill. Either way, this is not going to help his career in the slightest.

The paper is titled Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life, and just the sweeping grandiosity of that title should set off alarm bells. Here is the abstract:

Life is an inordinately complex unsolved puzzle. Despite significant theoretical progress, experimental anomalies, paradoxes, and enigmas have revealed paradigmatic limitations. Thus, the advancement of scientific understanding requires new models that resolve fundamental problems. Here, I present a theoretical framework that economically fits evidence accumulated from examinations of life. This theory is based upon a straightforward and non-mathematical core model and proposes unique yet empirically consistent explanations for major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet code, and DNA mutations. The theoretical framework unifies the macrocosmic and microcosmic realms, validates predicted laws of nature, and solves the puzzle of the origin and evolution of cellular life in the universe.

Having skimmed through all 105 pages of this thing, I can tell you with confidence that it answers none of those questions. Just the fact that it is entirely non-mathematical and non-empirical (there aren’t any observations or experiments described at all), and that the entirety of the theory is built around diagrams sketched out by the author, should also tell you that this is not a useful or predictive theory.

It does not have an auspicious beginning. In addition to being constructed around cartoons and being a non-mathematical Theory of Everything, it has to introduce an elaborate collection of neologisms that make the whole paper painful to read.

In the theory proposed herein, I use the heterodox yet simple gyre—a spiral, vortex, whorl, or similar circular pattern—as a core model for understanding life. Because many elements of the gyre model (gyromodel) are alien, I introduce neologisms and important terms in bold italics to identify them; a theoretical lexicon is presented in Table 1. The central idea of this theory is that all physical reality, stretching from the so-called inanimate into the animate realm and from micro- to meso- to macrocosmic scales, can be interpreted and modeled as manifestations of a single geometric entity, the gyre. This entity is attractive because it has life-like characteristics, undergoes morphogenesis, and is responsive to environmental conditions. The gyromodel depicts the spatiotemporal behavior and properties of elementary particles, celestial bodies, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and systems as quantized packets of information, energy, and/or matter that oscillate between excited and ground states around a singularity. The singularity, in turn, modulates these states by alternating attractive and repulsive forces. The singularity itself is modeled as a gyre, thus evincing a thermodynamic, fractal, and nested organization of the gyromodel. In fitting the scientific evidence from quantum gravity to cell division, this theory arrives at an understanding of life that questions traditional beliefs and definitions.

Here’s a partial copy of his lexicon. It goes on quite a bit longer than what I’ve copied here.

Page 1 of 3 | Next page