Who remembers the Peanut Butter Man, Chuck Missler? He was a creationist who ranked down there with Ray Comfort and Kent Hovind in the foolishness of his argument. Now a young evangelical exposes all the stupidity he’s been preaching in the decades since.
A reader has asked me to explain Axial Twist Theory. I don’t wanna.
OK, I dug into it a little bit. It’s a crank hypothesis promoted by a tiny number of people; it reminds me of Vortex theory and Lifecode, a couple of comprehensive theories of development proposed by obsessive individuals on the basis of biased interpretations of poor or even bogus observations. Coincidentally, my criticisms of those ideas led to serious threats of lawsuits, which is another strike against them (scientific hypotheses are not defended by lawsuits), and makes me wonder if I’m going to get sued again. No worries, those were not credible threats.
So what is it? There is a web page titled “Axial Twist Theory Explained”, and a Wikipedia page. They’re both terribly written, difficult to wade through, and I suspect both were written by the same person. The theory attempts to explain a phenomenon that doesn’t exist and doesn’t need explanation.
In short, the theory claims that the face and rostral nervous system were rotated during embryonic development and evolution, which they propose to explain the existence of decussations, like the way eyes project to contralateral regions of the central nervous system.
Schema of the proposed development of the axial twist. Developmental phases are (from top to bottom): (1) the embryo turns on its left side; (2) the anterior head grows in the same direction, but the rest of the body grows oppositely into a twist. So that ultimately (3) external bilateral symmetry is regained. Note that there is no evolutionary pressure for internal symmetry so the heart (and other organs) remain asymmetric.
We have no need of this hypothesis, and they have no evidence to support it. It’s that simple.
I’m pretty familiar with the concept of decussations in the nervous system. That’s what I studied in a previous life: my graduate work was on how the spinal cord gets wired up, and there are crossing fibers all up and down the cord. The lab I was in was focused on hindbrain neurons that crossed the midline to innervate contralateral motor outputs. If we needed to twist the whole axis to get them to cross, the whole nervous system would have to be twisted like the rubber band in a model airplane. It makes no sense.
As a post-doc I studied the development of commissural neurons in the grasshopper embryo. Axial Twist Theory confines itself to vertebrate development, so one might argue that grasshoppers are irrelevant, except that insects contain lots of crossing fibers that don’t require whole body twists to explain. It’s simply a functional consequence of needing to integrate both sides of the animal, and the mechanisms for generating it is straightforward molecular signaling that has existed since the last common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates.
But to be fair, let’s look at the research literature. Next problem: it’s negligible. Pubmed turns up one article: Opposite asymmetries of face and trunk and of kissing and hugging, as predicted by the axial twist hypothesis by Marc H.E. de Lussanet. It’s incredibly silly. For instance, bilateral symmetry is imperfect, so they interpret biases as the product of incomplete rotation of the face relative to the back of the head.
Exaggerated schema of the aurofacial asymmetry as predicted by the axial twist theory. During embryology and development, the face elements (red) are predicted to move toward the center from the left, with respect to the mid-plane between the ears.
It gets sillier. Part of the data in that paper was an analysis of photographs on the internet, and an experiment in which people were photographed hugging dolls and were observed in airports. Did I say silly? This is getting creepy.
Examples of left kissing (A) and right hugging (B).
The two schemas show a top view of the opposite behavioral asymmetries.
Apparently, the asymmetry during kissing is different than the asymmetry during hugging, which suggests that there is a twist between face and body. But even that is an ambiguous mess!
The kissing results also confirm the hypothesis and reproduces the findings of airport observations, experiments with dolls, as well as with couples and questionnaires. Earlier studies have revealed clear regional cultural influences: for example in some French cities, as well as in native Palestinian and Jewish Israelis, the kissing bias is reversed, whereas in a conservative muslim country (Bangladesh) the kissing bias is as in the other studies. Also, the bias in kissing and hugging behavior is strongly reduced by emotional contexts. For example, no bias was found in a public kiss between strangers. Thirdly, the kissing bias can be influenced by a lateral head tilt. For example, when kissing a doll head that is either 5° tilted to the right or 15° to the left resulted in a bias of almost 100% to the left and right side of the face respectively. Finally, both the kissing and hugging bias seem to be reduced in left handers
How do you draw conclusions about an embryonic transition that had to have occurred in the Precambrian from a wildly variable behavior in modern humans? The author treats this noise as a solid demonstration of the Axial Twist Hypothesis.
We thus showed that humans also behave as twisted creatures, as predicted by the ATH. Asking people why they kiss or hug this way, or to try it the other way leads to responses such as “it somehow feels better, more natural like this.” We thus tend to kiss as if the ventral side of the face has not quite arrived in the centre, but is still located to the left. Correspondingly, we tend to hug as if the ventral trunk is located to the right of the sagittal plane.
The final strike for me is their gross misinterpretation of zebrafish development. They claim that there is a rotation of the two eyes that fits their model, and they show a single short timelapse.
I spent years staring in a microscope at early, developing zebrafish embryos. No, the eyes don’t rotate around the body axis. In that video, they’re showing a slightly askew perspective on the head and drawing red and blue overlays on the eyes to emphasize an asymmetry inherent in the angle.
I don’t have to explain the Axial Twist Theory because it’s an imaginary phenomenon with no good evidence for it, used to explain poor observations that don’t need a deep evolutionary/embryological foundation.
It was still a little bit entertaining to dive into some bad science.
It’s really hard to make humor out of ignorance. These examples are all too close to arguments I routinely and repetitively hear.
Come on, what about whales?
It’s in the New York Post, so you know it must be true. They’ve extracted alien corpses from multiple crashed flying saucers, and they’ve been able to taxonomically classify the four different kinds of ET. Conveniently, they all look like they’d be able to be cast for the low-quality make-up capabilities of a TV series on a budget. They’re straight from Dr Who or Star Trek.
Stop laughing.
The Post did their research and found a former Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program advisor and CIA-funded researcher
and quantum physicist
to back them up. Unfortunately, their source Hal Puthoff. Puthoff is an electrical engineer (synonymous with quantum physicist, apparently) and Scientologist who is best known for the infamous Puthoff & Targ “research” on Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute. He has since moved on to promote remote viewing and zero point energy. He’s a notorious kook, so it’s not surprising that he’d happily vouch for those goofy aliens.
No one will be surprised to learn that RFK jr is trying to bias the scientific literature. He’s upset that the journal Toxicology Reports had killed an article that supported his weird belief that childhood vaccines are causing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, so he pressured them to restore it.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, is demanding answers from a medical journal that recently removed a paper suggesting a link between vaccines and infant death, saying their decision was “of great interest to me”.
Public health advocates immediately criticized the move, and said Kennedy appeared to be trying to intimidate and influence the journal’s editorial process. The journal Toxicology Reports had removed the paper this spring after editors determined it was so seriously flawed it could harm patients and pose a risk to public health.
This is patent meddling in the publication of scientific ideas. David Gorski commented on it.
Dr David Gorski, a surgical oncologist who has written extensively about the antivaccine movement, pointed out in a post that Kennedy has portrayed himself as pro-free speech, but that he was “apparently using the power of his position” to put pressure on an editorial decision by a private publisher.
“To antivaxxers, it’s free speech for me, but not for thee,” Gorski wrote on X.
I’m interested in that bit about how the paper was “seriously flawed”. The first clue is that the paper is yet another example of VAERS cherry-picking, a common tactic by vaccine deniers to scavenge through reports of vaccine effects to find isolated examples that they they then assemble into fanciful fairy tales of statistical significance, and that’s what this paper is.
The paper raised concern among scientists soon after it was published in 2021 by Neil Z Miller. It used reports made in the federal government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to find what Miller said were “unusual patterns and safety signals highly suggestive of a causal relationship” between vaccination and Sids. VAERS is a vaccine safety monitoring program where anyone can submit a report about any suspected adverse health event that happens after a vaccination.
The second clue is that the author is Neil Z Miller. They can stop right there — Miller has an entry in the Encyclopedia of American Loons. He’s not a scientist, not a doctor, and has no qualifications whatsoever, and all he does is comb through diverse data to assemble “evidence” supporting his a priori conclusion that vaccines are bad, mmmK?
Neil Z. Miller is a “medical research journalist”, “health pioneer”, “independent researcher” (yes, that means exactly what you think it means) and Director of the Thinktwice Global Vaccine Institute, an anti-vaccine organization listed here (and Miller has a long history in various altmed and antivaxx organizations). Gary S. Goldman is an “independent computer scientist” affiliated with WAVE – World Association for Vaccine Education, another anti-vaxx organization, and President and Founder of Medical Veritas, a rabidly anti-vaccine “journal” (listed here) that is into HIV/AIDS denialism as well, having published dubious “reanalyses” of autopsy results of victims of AIDS. Neither Miller nor Goldman have any qualifications that would lead one to think that they have any special expertise in epidemiology, vaccines, or science. But they have google and are not afraid to use it.
Together they have actually managed to publish a paper or two in obscure journals, where they completely misunderstand data in favor of their cherished hypotheses. In “Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?” they “found” that nations requiring the most vaccines tend to have the worst infant mortality rates, and their cherry-picking of data and speculation needed to reach that conclusion are rather painful – quite simply yet another poorly planned, poorly executed, poorly analyzed study that is poorly done exactly because it needs to be in order to show what the authors want it to show, namely that vaccines cause autism, a hypothesis so thoroughly falsified as any in the history of science. The study was of course praised in the venues you’d suspect, and where the assessment of the methodology used in the study is determined by whether it supports the conclusions the praiser wants it to show. Indeed, it was even praised at NaturalNews in a long post written by … Miller himself.
That paper should not have been accepted in the first place, and now we have RFK jr stepping in to push for its publication. And what qualifications does RFK jr have to assess scientific papers? Also none whatsoever.
In case you’ve ever wondered how to use a menstrual cup, don’t ask AI. They might give you a nightmare illustration.
But wait! There’s more! I decided to ask the Google AI to explain the diagram. It didn’t see any problem.
AI Overview
• This 3D medical animation illustrates a medical-grade silicone menstrual cup inserted into the vaginal canal to collect rather than absorb menstrual flow.
• The visualization highlights the proper sagittal view placement, emphasizing a comfortable position below the cervix and angled towards the sacrum.
• It serves as a reusable, eco-friendly alternative to traditional period products like pads and tampons, capable of being worn for 8–12 hours.
Now you know. Just punch the cup into the bladder and through your cervix to completely replace your uterus.
I lost all respect for Matt Ridley years ago, when I wrote:
Matt Ridley is definitely a smart guy, and he also writes well. I enjoyed some of his earlier books, like The Red Queen and Genome, but I became less appreciative as he became more openly libertarian, and espoused a Whiggish view of the world that was only a rationalization for why he was so wealthy and privileged (he’s kind of the British version of Pinker, only worse). He’s the 5th Viscount Ridley, don’t you know, he is to the manor born (Blagdon Hall, Northumberland, specifically), he’s a member of the House of Lords, he endorsed Brexit, he owns coal mines, he used to own a bank, but he ran it into the ground and it was taken away from him and nationalized. On climate change, he’s argued that global warming is going to be a net benefit, increasing rainfall and the growing season, and that human ingenuity will overcome any minor disruptions. He even coauthored a book with Anthony Watts and Bjorn Lomborg and a host of the usual denialist suspects, Climate Change: The Facts 2017, which ought to alarm anyone who wants to think he’s just being objective. I guess that comes of owning coal mines and being an enthusiastic endorser of fracking — when your prosperity is a product of spewing as much fossil carbon into the atmosphere as you can, your very smart brain will work very hard to find excuses.
At this point, he is an irredeemable kook — but a well-connected and wealthy one, who gets invited to all kinds of events hosted by the corrupt, criminal kooks in charge of the US government. He was recently invited to address the NIH on the “lab leak” hypothesis, the discredited conspiracy theory that China intentionally engineered the COVID virus to wreak havoc on the West, but accidentally released into their home territory of Wuhan. It’s absurd. No one who knows anything about virology or molecular genetics thinks it is at all plausible, or credits it as valid in the face of all the evidence that it originated naturally from wild populations, or zoonosis.
Nevertheless, Ridly got invited to present his innuendo, lack of evidence, and leaps of illogic at a major meeting of the formerly prestigious NIH.
Must Trump get his face put front and center of everything?
Don’t trust me that the “lab leak” is a garbage hypothesis? Larry Moran and Lindsay Beyerstein both shredded these “lab leak” claims years ago, but conspiracy theories seem to be invulnerable to little things like evidence and reason.
Add another critic to the long list of knowledgeable scientists who find Ridley risible: Angela Rasmussen. She gives five really strong reasons why the “lab leak” nonsense is wrong, and also seems to have even less respect for Ridley and Bhattacharya than I do.
I don’t know Ridley’s motivation besides being a pompous literal coal baron who led the UK into the 2007 financial crisis with the first run on a British bank in 130 years, and who expects to be taken seriously despite the fact that he seems like a foppish secondary antagonist in a forgettable Dr. Who episode. Unfortunately, Ridley is taken seriously by his fellow pompous, insubstantial windbags, and even more unfortunately, they are the windbags in charge who invited him.
It is no mystery why Podcast Jay [Bhattacharya] rolled out the red carpet for the distinguished Viscount despite his lack of qualifications or relevant expertise on the topic. He knows that Matt Ridley is writing fiction. He shows up to launder conspiracist lies through an indignant upper class British accent in service of Bhattacharya’s ultimate goal: to declare all NIH research reckless, dangerous, and absolutely the worst thing we could possibly do. Better redirect the money for these irresponsible Alzheimer’s, HIV, and diabetes treatments to the White House. President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought will know what to do with all those funds.
I don’t see enough news and criticisms of Bhattacharya — he’s in charge of the NIH, he’s an idiot, he’s busy dismantling the American scientific institutions, but mostly what gets into the press are the disastrous decisions of the bigger fools in the cabinet. Make no mistake, though, he’s one of the nastier parasites gnawing at the foundations of our science establishment.
And now he invited Ridley to speak. The Ridley who makes these kinds of ludicrous accusations:
You can tell what kind of man he is by the people he lumps together as enemies with Hamas: a couple of credible, qualified scientists and trans people. His right-wing politics are showing.
I’m also triggered by the phrase “scientifically accurate.”
Ken Ham is going to be at a benefit dinner. If you want to join him, you’ll have to pay.
$30,000 to sit at a trough with that pig-ignorant liar and fraud Ken Ham? To benefit a ghastly Christian school that promotes ignorance to the children of rich dopes? Jesus, I’m in the wrong business.
I have a counter-offer. Come to Morris, Minnesota and we can have a hearty Midwestern breakfast at Don’s Cafe. I’ll pay since you have to go to all the trouble of getting here. We’ll have a pleasant and interesting conversation, and maybe afterwards I can take you on a tour of a real college, the University of Minnesota Morris.
That’s the best deal I’ve got. I’ll also apologize for the fact that the USA has become the Upside-Down.
Drop me an email and let me know when you’re coming down.
Too on-the-nose? I don’t think so. Lysenko was put in charge of Soviet agriculture after declaring that Mendelian genetics was false, and that his Lamarckist delusions were the future of science. Robert F. Kennedy Jr rejects germ theory and immunology to promote his “miasma theory” bullshit. Lysenko came to power in the 1920s, RFK Jr a hundred years later.
It’s about time we noted the parallels between the two charlatans.
Lysenko’s views and actions have a resonance today when considering the activities of Robert F Kennedy Jr, who was appointed by Donald Trump as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services in February 2025. Of course, Trump has repeatedly sought to impose his own agenda on US science, with his destructive impact outlined in a detailed report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists in July 2025.
Lysenko set Soviet science back by decades. We should ask how far the similarities will go. It’s not reassuring.
Lysenko retained his position after Stalin died, and was reappointed by Kruschev. His scientific influence was waning — that none of his methods worked led to disaffection in the scientific community, if not so much in the political community. He wasn’t denounced until the mid-1960s (remember Sakharov?) and lingered on in retirement until his death in 1976.
If the parallels hold, let’s hope they don’t, we’re going to be wrestling with the ideological garbage RFK jr infused into American science until the 2060s.
