A viewer of my video about the claim that viruses come from space noticed something I had ignored: the list of coauthors on the Steele/Wickramasinghe paper. Wickramasinghe always stacks on a long list of coauthors, which is probably one of the ways he manages to buy in support for his trash papers. Anyway, one of his coauthors is peculiar: a fellow named Robert Temple, who is affiliated with something called The History of Chinese Science and Culture Foundation, which appears to be nothing but a flashy website…an odd choice when you’re asked to list your prestigious associations. But then, Temple only has an undergraduate degree and exercises little discrimination in what he puts on his CV — I get the impression he’s one of those people desperate to get academic validation, but not so desperate that he’s willing to do the work.
His name seems to find its way on a fair number of Wickramasinghe’s papers, like this one, Growing Evidence against Global Infection-Driven by Person-to-Person Transfer of COVID-19, which tries to argue that you can’t get infected by contact with fluids from other people, so, by implication, everyone who has COVID-19 was directly infected by an infall of the virus from outer space. There may be some transmission through handshakes, he claims, but it’s primarily caused by a rain of viruses from space. This is irresponsible nonsense, and one could ask what the heck a guy with an undergraduate degree in Sanskrit is doing on the list of authors anyway. I guess if it also includes Brig Klyce, who my fellow old-timers from talk.origins will remember as the panspermia wackaloon who haunted newsgroups, they might as well chuck in any ol’ weirdo who voices support for their claims.
Jason Colavito has the full scoop on Temple. His claim to fame rests on a book called The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago, in which he argues that “amphibious extraterrestrials from Sirius” provided advanced scientific knowledge to the Dogon people and to the Sumerians and to any random ancient culture he doesn’t believe was smart enough to actually have done the things they did.
Yeah, he’s one of those pseudoarchaeologists who believes in ancient astronauts. On the basis of those exemplary credentials, he’s now getting stuffed onto papers by the Panspermia Mafia. If you must, you can listen to him blather on for over an hour and a half on the Dogon people (I wasn’t able to listen to it — he’s one of the more goddamn boring and pretentious lecturers I’ve ever heard). Also, annoyingly, he calls himself “Professor Temple”, despite having no academic appointment anywhere. He obviously knows nothing about virology, epidemiology, or biology in general — he’s just a poseur who gets his name on papers he’s not qualified to critique. But then, I could say the same thing about Chandra Wickramasinghe.
When I tried to track down this coauthor, though, another discovery is that the Wickramasinghe group have gone on a disgraceful binge recently, taking advantage of legitimate concerns about the pandemic to flood various journals with bad papers about COVID-19. I’ll repeat what I said before: if a paper has Wickramasinghe’s name on it, it’s garbage. Use his name as a filter, and you’ll cull out a lot of dross. It’s too bad the scientific publishers haven’t figured this out yet and blacklisted him, as they should.
David Gorski (“Orac”) promulgates the concept of crank magnetism. Various crankeries attract. In this case panspermia and ancient astronauts, but the adherents of any wacknut theory you can think of are likely to believe in others as well. Antivax seems particularly promiscuous.
Simple question: If Covid-19 is falling from space, why isn’t it evenly distributed? D’oh.
Sorry but someone had to do it.
I was going to try and say something about how you were advocating cancel culture to make a joke but I could not figure out how to put the words together to sound even a little bit convincing. I just can’t think like that nor understand how people can say things that are so blatantly false.
uncle frogy
If Covid-19 is falling from space, why isn’t it evenly distributed?
Because of quantum. Or vibrations. Or magnetism. Or it is evenly distributed but people aren’t. Or G5 (or WiFi). Or pyramid something (probably also quantum, etc.). Might even be the ray gun spraying the stuff isn’t spraying the entire planet (or it’s mostly under the flight routes (chemtrails)). Probably all those things, and other woo-woo as well…
Other than some panspermia that involves someone driving around in their Starshit Boobyprize (what anything approaching Tau 0 would be operating as the incoming blue shifted EM radiation turns into some serious, pair producing gamma radiation to photodisintegegrate the leading hull) dropping off seedlings of some sort, perhaps apple seeds that’ll thrive in a methane atmosphere dominated planet’s ocean bottom?
I’d still need to hear how this magical life could otherwise arrive, with the insane particle flux irradiating any rocks coming toward us, plus hard x-ray and gamma radiation that’d penetrate every micron of any asteroid in this solar system – for millions to billions of years and all organelles remain functional, as well as RNA and or DNA.
So, two ways in which life couldn’t possibly find a way or even come close, both ways ending up seared heavily on the galactic grille.
Still, I wonder if he thinks that polio also is coming from space and if so, why did smallpox stop coming, since vaccination rendered it extinct in the wild and if it’s still raining it, despite global lack of vaccinations against it, whereinhell is it?
I can predict an answer, camelpox and monkeypox, hand waving, with wall of text bullshit, ignoring the genetic code being different.
And I’d counter that Sanskrit and our use of the alphabet in English is precisely the same as well. Using the same methods, in a more humorous way.
cervantes @1, you say that “David Gorski (“Orac”) promulgates the concept of crank magnetism.” Could you link to a post of his, or something? I just read Orac a lot and would like to read those posts.
And, why couldn’t you get COVID by contact with others’ body fluids? I would think it’d depend on which fluid, as there’d probably be different viral loads in different ones. And also, how efficiently you were exposed to the fluid. I mean, are we talking about injecting blood from an infected person with a high viral load into your vein? I’d think that that might work.
Aren’t nasal or oral droplets from infected people considered to qualify as “body fluids”? Oh well, no use asking cranks to make sense.
I curious what people think of the following paper about the Sturgis rally and covid effects. (no space bugs in this…)
abstract:
Superspreading Event:The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19*
Large in-person gatherings without social distancing and with individuals who have traveled outside the local area are classified as the “highest risk” for COVID-19 spread by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Between August 7 and August 16, 2020, nearly 500,000 motorcycle enthusiasts converged on Sturgis, South Dakota for its annual motorcycle rally. Large crowds, coupled with minimal mask-wearing and social distancing by attendees, raised concerns that this event could serve as a COVID-19 “super-spreader.” This study is the first to explore the impact of this event on social distancing and the spread of COVID-19. First, using anonymized cell phone data from SafeGraph, Inc. we document that (i) smartphone pings from non-residents, and (ii) foot traffic at restaurants and bars, retail establishments, entertainment venues, hotels and campgrounds each rose substantially in the census block groups hosting Sturgis rally events. Stay-at-home behavior among local residents, as measured by median hours spent at home, fell. Second, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a synthetic control approach, we show that by September 2, a month following the onset of the Rally, COVID-19 cases increased by approximately 6 to 7 cases per 1,000 population in its home county of Meade. Finally, difference-in-differences (dose response) estimates show that following the Sturgis event, counties that contributed the highest inflows of rally attendees experienced a 7.0 to 12.5 percent increase in COVID-19 cases relative to counties that did not contribute inflows. Descriptive evidence suggests these effects may be muted in states with stricter mitigation policies (i.e., restrictions on bar/restaurant openings, mask-wearing mandates). We conclude that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally generated public health costs of approximately $12.2 billion.
paper:
http://ftp.iza.org/dp13670.pdf
@garnetstar #6, Orac’s site is searchable. I recall that post is a fair number of years old, but he doesn’t weed out his old posts at Respectful Insolence.
As for body fluids, some viral infections tend to harbor last in immune privileged areas, such as eyes, gonads and well, I really don’t think we need to worry about cerebrospinal fluid exposure. Mostly, thus far, it’s been potentially oral-fecal (SARS had confirmed cases in apartment buildings with leaky septic pipes) and respiratory droplets, with no confirmed infections via tears or reproductive fluid exchange – yet. Given the way this virus has thus far surprised us though, I’m not willing to bet on anything just yet.
In other wonderful news (read: not good, nor wonderful at all), we’re up to 500000 children in the US infected, despite the god-king, emperor wannabe proclaiming that they’re not easily infected. We can only expect a massive increase in infections among siblings, parents and other familial caregivers now.
“I’ll repeat what I said before: if a paper has Wickramasinghe’s name on it, it’s garbage. Use his name as a filter, and you’ll cull out a lot of dross. It’s too bad the scientific publishers haven’t figured this out yet and blacklisted him, as they should.”
I get what you’re saying, PZ, but I can’t go along with the idea of a “Wickramasinghe” filter. His work should be rejected because paper by paper because each and every “study” has been terrible, not because of who he is. And there’s still a constant torrent of waste through the Cloaca Major of scientific publishing that is not associated with W himself.
@3: The reason why you can’t make it even sound plausible is because we generally accept responsibility being assessed to frauds and people who break normative rules, at least to some extent. The powerful have an interest in peer review working. They don’t much care if a celebrity demonizes marginalized people.
@9: Nonsense, Chris. Just like Wakefield should not have anything published in a medical journal ever again barring exemplary evidence of changed behavior, and just like convicted embezzlers should probably not go back to work at accounting. The bug in the peer review system is trust. Unless someone blows the whistle on you, you can always make up your observations as long as you go through the process of appearing to collect them. We have to trust the data collection of people. When some people aren’t even qualified in a field, that alone should make a high bar for them to be published, because they are not qualified either for the primary data collection or secondary interpretation and commentary necessary to offer even review articles. And when they are demonstrably dishonest or willfully incompetent, editors should indeed require extraordinary evidence to get something in.
The Dogon! The poor Dogon! Hey, we did that here on Pharyngula, with the Paradigm Symposium and a visit from our very special guest, Laird Scranton! Yaaaay!
Ooh, something I’d forgotten:
Maybe PZ’s interest in spiders arose because of Sirius business!