He’s done: Rebecca Watson takes on Avi Loeb

Loeb gets a quick filleting from Rebecca.

I know exactly how Loeb would respond, if he were to even notice, because he posted a rant 4 days ago.

The culture of superficial toxicity poses an existential threat to curiosity-driven innovation in science. This culture is fueled by social-media mobs, whose members use the megaphone of blogs and tweets to amplify hate towards professional scientists who are following the traditional practice of evidence-based research. Why would the critics do that? Because of jealousy at the public’s attention to novel ideas.

One might naively argue that there is nothing to worry about because scientific innovation was always about “survival of the fittest” in the realm of ideas. However, the professional test of innovative ideas is empirical evidence, and following it requires extensive work. In contrast, the opinion of superficial critics is easier to come by. It involves raising ash and claiming that they do not see anything. Toxic critics often use personal attacks to nip innovation in the bud. They poison the well of novel ideas by creating fear among young scholars who, as a result of witnessing trauma, hesitate to come up with new ideas because of the damaging repercussions to their job prospects.

Snrk. The traditional practice of evidence-based research and empirical evidence — things Loeb does not have. Evidence always has a context and a theoretical foundation. You can’t just pull something out of your ass, hold it up, and claim you’ve found evidence for your astonishing radical idea, and that’s basically what he’s got: he pulled up some tiny metallic spheres from the sea floor, and is claiming that they came from a meteor that wasn’t even of extrasolar origin, and he can’t even say with confidence that they came from a meteor at all, especially given that expert analysis suggests that it’s from terrestrial coal ash.

Man, I suspect that every night Loeb goes to bed angry and has a tough time getting to sleep because he’s busy building resentful retorts in his head.

Assembly Theory pops up again

This morning I was surprised to see Assembly Theory popping up all over in my social media. Did somebody find evidence for it? Did the authors clarify what their babble meant? No, nothing so interesting: another evolutionary biologist took a hard look at the original paper, and tried to figure out what Cronin was talking about.

In October, a paper titled “Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution” appeared in the top science journal Nature. The authors – a team led by Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow and Sara Walker at Arizona State University – claim their theory is an “interface between physics and biology” which explains how complex biological forms can evolve.

The paper provoked strong responses. On the one hand were headlines like “Bold New ‘Theory of Everything’ Could Unite Physics And Evolution”.

On the other were reactions from scientists. One evolutionary biologist tweeted “after multiple reads I still have absolutely no idea what [this paper] is doing”. Another said “I read the paper and I feel more confused […] I think reading that paper has made me forget my own name.”

As a biologist who studies evolution, I felt I had to read the paper myself. Was assembly theory really the radical new paradigm its authors suggested? Or was it the “abject wankwaffle” its critics decried?

He highlights some of the weird stuff in the paper, like this observation that leapt out at me when I read it.

In the words of one Nature commenter: “Why so many creationist tropes in the first few sentences?”

Yeah, that was odd: either the author was so totally unaware of how creationists make really bad arguments, so he made one himself (the generous interpretation), or it was intentional, and he’s underhandedly trying to sneak creationist nonsense in the literature (the uncharitable interpretation). Either way it was a warning sign.

So the critic works through the paper, trying to answer the question, is it “abject wankwaffle” or not? The answer is phrased politely.

However, as a sweeping new paradigm aiming to unify evolution and physics, assembly theory appears – to me and many others – to be addressing a problem that does not exist.

“abject wankwaffle” it is!

Assembly Theory is Ontogenetic Depth relabeled, nothing more, and is just as useless

How exactly did this dreck, Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution, get published in Nature?

It’s a stunningly bad paper to be published in such a prestigious journal. Let’s dissect that abstract, shall we?

Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution1,2 with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics.

This makes no sense. Evolutionary biologists have not had any problem with physical laws — it has always been assumed, as far as I know, that biology fits within the framework of chemistry and physics. What grappling? Have biologists been proposing theories that violate physics, and they didn’t tell me?

The citations to back up that outré claim are Stuart Kauffman, who can get a little weird but not that weird, and Ryan Gregory, whose papers I’ve used in class, and is probably a bit annoyed at being told his work supports that ridiculous claim.

These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena.

Sure. Emergent properties exist. We know you can’t simply derive all of biology from Ideal Gas Law. So far, nothing new.

Evolutionary theory explains why some things exist and others do not through the lens of selection.

Uh-oh. Just selection? Tell me you know nothing of evolutionary biology without saying you don’t know anything about evolutionary biology.

To comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint, a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is necessary3,4,5.

Here it comes, more bad theorizing. It is implicit in evolution that there is no “inherent design blueprint,” so where did these authors get the idea that design was a reasonable alternative? They don’t say. This is simply another imaginary controversy they’ve invented to make their theory look more powerful.

We don’t need a new approach to selection. To support that, they cite Charles Darwin (???) and Sean B. Carroll, and a fellow named Steven Frank, whose work I’m unfamiliar with. A quick search shows that he applies “evolutionary principles to the biochemistry of microbial metabolism,” which doesn’t sound foreign to standard biology, although he does throw the word “design” around a lot.

But here we go:

We present assembly theory (AT) as a framework that does not alter the laws of physics, but redefines the concept of an ‘object’ on which these laws act. AT conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories. This allows objects to show evidence of selection, within well-defined boundaries of individuals or selected units.

Again, what biological theory has ever been proposed that alters the laws of physics? They keep touting this as a key feature of their model, that it doesn’t break physics, but no credible theory does. This talk of formation histories is nothing revolutionary, history and contingency are already important concepts in biology. Are they really going to somehow quantify “assembly”? They’re going to try.

We introduce a measure called assembly (A), capturing the degree of causation required to produce a given ensemble of objects. This approach enables us to incorporate novelty generation and selection into the physics of complex objects. It explains how these objects can be characterized through a forward dynamical process considering their assembly.

I’ve heard this all before, somewhere. A new term invented, a claim of a novel measure of the complexity of a pathway, a shiny new parameter with no clue how to actually measure it? This is just ontogenetic depth! Paul Nelson should be proud that his bad idea has now been enshrined in the pages of Nature, under a new label. I did a quick check: Nelson is not cited in the paper. Sorry, Paul.

Here is all assembly theory is: You count the number of steps it takes to build an organic something, and presto, you’ve got a number A that tells you how difficult it was to evolve that something. That’s it. Biology is revolutionized and reconciled with physics. It’s just that stupid.

a–c, AT is generalizable to different classes of objects, illustrated here for three different general types. a, Assembly pathway to construct diethyl phthalate molecule considering molecular bonds as the building blocks. The figure shows the pathway starting with the irreducible constructs to create the molecule with assembly index 8. b, Assembly pathway of a peptide chain by considering building blocks as strings. Left, four amino acids as building blocks. Middle, the actual object and its representation as a string. Right, assembly pathway to construct the string. c, Generalized assembly pathway of an object comprising discrete components.

I told you, it’s just ontogenetic depth, with basic math. Here’s how to calculate A:

All you have to do is recursively sum the value of A for each object in the series, and you get the value of A for the whole! How you calculate the value of A for, say, acetate or guanine or oxaloacetic acid or your nose or a lobe of your liver is left as an exercise for the reader. It is also left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how A is going to affect their implementation of evolutionary biology.

By reimagining the concept of matter within assembly spaces, AT provides a powerful interface between physics and biology. It discloses a new aspect of physics emerging at the chemical scale, whereby history and causal contingency influence what exists.

I read the whole thing. I failed to see any new aspect of physics, or any utility to the theory at all. I don’t see any way to apply this framework to evolutionary biology, or what I’d do if I could calculate A for one of my spiders (fortunately, I don’t see any way to figure out the A of Steatoda triangulosa, so I’m spared the effort of even trying.)

The primary author, Leroy Cronin, a chemistry professor at the University of Glasgow, acknowledges that the work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Quelle surprise!

I honestly don’t understand how such a steaming pile managed to get past the editors and reviewers at Nature. It should have been laughed away as pure crank science and tossed out the window. There has to have been a lot of steps where peer review failed…maybe someone should try to calculate the assembly value for getting a paper published in Nature so we can figure out how it happened.

Sharma, A., Czégel, D., Lachmann, M. et al. Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9

It’s your lucky day!

The Neuralink Patient Registry is now open! You too can now apply to have a robot operate on your brain (if you meet the requirements: you must be a quadriplegic over the age of 22 who has no other implants and is not prone to seizures.) It’s the most horrendously awful lottery ever.

Not only must the victims patients have experienced extreme tragedy and trauma, but they will be subject to intense, invasive surgery with no guaranteed outcome, and the procedure is entirely experimental with the goal of not restoring any function, but simply to test whether their surgical robot works without scrambling your brain.

Best case, if it works, you will be able to play Pong with your mind, at least until the scar tissue disables the whole device, or it triggers dangerous seizures. Also consider the implications of the requirements to enroll: no other implants allowed. When the new, improved MkII Neuralink comes out, that means MkI recipients will be undesirable. They’re always going to want fresh, untrammeled brains to hack into.

If I were in such dire straits to qualify, I wouldn’t apply. I wouldn’t need to make my situation worse, with such feeble promise of reward.

The Muslim fly studies are back!

Stop me if you’ve heard this before…oh wait. If you’ve read this blog before you’ve encountered this phenomenon in the past. There is a strange cottage industry among Muslim fanatics to demonstrate the infallibility of Mohammed by testing one of his weirder claims. This one:

Over a thousand years ago Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) said “if a fly falls down on your vessel, drown it then remove it, for one of its wings has the ailment and other has the cure” narrated by Al-Bokhari. In this study 4 flies of (Musca domestica) species were collected to investigate the antibacterial and antifungal activity of their wings. The obtained result showed that all media cultivated with right wing extract were free of bacterial and fungal growth however the bacterial and fungal growth for the left wing were observed. It could be concluded that the right fly wing is considered as new revolution of antibiotic recommended for further researches to find more antibiotics from right fly wing.

That’s from an article with the ungrammatical title, Microbiological Studies on Fly Wings(Musca domestica) Where Disease and Treat. I guess the World Journal of Medical Sciences does not exercise any editorial oversight at all, and their review process is a bit of a joke. The paper itself is incredibly bad, of a quality that would earn a failing grade if it were presented as a middle school science fair project. I mean, seriously — here’s the entirety of the results section (with a bit of the introduction and methods).

Pic. (1), (2) and (3) illustrated that there were no bacterial or fungal growth in test tubes containing the right fly wing extract however there were microbial growth in 4 test tubes for left wings extract indicated by turbidity which had been confirmed by microscopical examination, the slides for the right wings extract were free for the presence of any microbe although the slides for the left ones showed presence of both bacteria (cocci and bacilli) and fungi (hyphea)

That’s it. That’s all. Do you believe any of it? It’s not just the lack of believable data, but the introduction is full of obvious nonsense.

Entomologist latest research, certify that there is very little difference between a human and a fly-heart where biggest similarity is that both have heart disease as a result of getting older. Studied flies in order to produce cardiac medications

I know what both a fly heart and a human heart look like — and no, the only similarity is in some of the molecules that initiate differentiation.

I guess the only thing we can learn here is that the World Journal of Medical Sciences is not a trustworthy source. It’s a dumping ground for bad science and is nothing but a tool for incompetent pseudoscientists to pad their résumé.

People actually think that way

I know I tend to get peevish about bad biology and reductionism and equating human beings with their gametes, but it’s a real problem.

The debate about Margot Robbie being mid or hot, whatever — ignores her important eugenic quality — she has a powerful jawline. She was designed to birth Jocks. Women have aesthetic purpose, but their main purpose is to birth the next generation.

Oh sure, she’s pretty, but her main reason for existence is to have babies, and Rægenhere can tell from her physiognomy what kind of children she’ll have. Riiight. So many things wrong with that claim.

These people actually exist.

It’s all quantum

Where could these wacky ideas about physics have come from?

That UFO “whistleblower,” David Grusch, who so captivated Tucker Carlson with his credibility, is back and singing like a canary. He’s spilling all the beans about America’s secret UFO program.

Grusch, who received a college scholarship from the Air Force to study physics, did not describe the unusual aircraft as technology from another planet. I don’t want to necessarily denote origin, he said. I don’t think we have all the data to say, Oh, they’re coming from a certain location. Grusch proposed the vehicles the Pentagon is hiding could have come from a different physical dimension as described in quantum mechanics, saying, We know there are extra dimensions due to high-energy particle collisions, etc., and there’s a theoretical framework to explain that.

It could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial and actually that it’s coming from a higher-dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here, he said.

In the interview, Grusch reiterated that he has not personally seen the evidence of nonhuman technology but that intelligence officials he spoke with as part of his role on the UFO task force have told him of its existence.

Grusch came so close to the truth. Of these UFOs he has never seen and never witnessed any physical evidence of their existence, he concluded I remember interviewing these personnel and thinking, Either these people are lying to me, having a psychotic break, or this is some crazy but true stuff that’s happening. But somehow he accepted his third option.

Ceci n’est pas une définition

I put a fairly substantial effort in critiquing that awful paper by Krylov and Co, and now my efforts are rewarded with a rebuttal by Lee Jussim. Oh no. I tremble in fear. But I will bravely acknowledge that his criticisms.

Ole PZ makes a zillion different points, nearly all wrong regarding our paper, but here I’ll just focus on one as illustration. He claims:

The first big problem, and one that plagues the whole paper, is that merit isn’t actually defined.

Ole PZ is a bit familiar for someone I don’t know, but I’ll overlook it. As he says, I made a zillion different points, so I have to congratulate him on wisely focusing on just one. It must be one that I really got embarrassingly wrong, so no doubt his refutation will be devastating.

He has chosen my claim that there is no definition of merit anywhere in their paper, so I anticipate that he will now quote the section of the paper that clearly defines merit, leaving me crushed and humiliated. I read on, dreading my imminent disgrace, and here it is, the part where he exposes me as someone who wasn’t able to understand their paper. This is where he defines “merit” for us all:

This is Figure 2 from the paper:

Of course, the “importance” of any given discovery, talk or paper may be pretty subjective until the fullness of time has weighed in. As our paper repeatedly acknowledged, scientists’ biases may creep in to influence judgments of merit. Nonetheless, we now know that discoveries that cigarettes cause cancer, that bacteria, not stress, cause ulcers and that genes influence many physical and psychological characteristics are pretty important, each of which was doubted, controversial or even dismissed at the time. It also took some time to discover that certain ideas lack merit (e.g., thalidomide is not safe to administer to women who are or might be pregnant; the implicit association test does not measure “unconscious racism”).

Uh, what?

I was expecting a howitzer shell to land on me and blow all my arguments away…but this is it? A graph with two quantitatively undefined axes, but merit still isn’t defined at all. Instead, we’ve got two additional magic words, importance and strength of evidence, with no explanation of how they’re assessed. How do we determine what is important? That’s the whole question here, and he has just deferred the meaning of merit to a different subjective term, importance, modified by another fuzzy parameter, strength of evidence.

OK, so where’s that definition of merit? This is the best he can do? I guess he instead decided to demonstrate the validity of my point, that merit isn’t actually defined. If it were, he would have trotted it out here.

Instead, we get a paragraph making excuses that merit may be pretty subjective and isn’t always going to be obvious. Great! So my comments must have been pretty accurate.

I’m relieved to have emerged unscathed from that rebuttal, but also disappointed. Why are my opponents always so pathetic? I set myself up with a strong claim, that Jussim noticed, and he wasn’t even able to muster a single logical point against it. Pathetic.

I really didn’t have to type all those words. Apparently I should just reply with a bad graph.

I keep missing their funerals!

I am a neglectful nemesis. I told you before that the Slymepit had died, and it took me six months to find out. Now I learn that Bill Dembski’s blog, Uncommon Descent, has expired. I’m only about 2 months late to the party, so I’m getting better.

As his blog sank, Dembski was crowing in triumph.

In closing this farewell, I want to say special thanks to Jack Cole, who was the webmaster all these years and put in so many unremunerated hours; to Denyse O’Leary, whose quick pen and sharp insights supplied a never-ending stream of fruitful content; and to Barry Arrington, whose work in administering the site and writing for it kept the trains running. And finally, thanks to all the contributors and commenters over the years who, in supporting ID, have been on the right side of truth and will ultimately be vindicated for being on the right side of history.

Nothing in any of the Intelligent Design creationism blogs were on the right side of truth. Dembski has always been fond of making grandiose proclamations that fly in the face of reality, like this one.

In the next five years, molecular Darwinism – the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level – will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this. For ID to win the day, however, will require talented new researchers able to move this research program forward, showing how intelligent design provides better insights into biological systems than the dying Darwinian paradigm.

He wrote that in 2004. It’s a standard trope in creationism to announce the imminent death of Darwinism even as they are being stuffed into a grave. See also the Wedge document from 1998, where they predicted major legal and scientific victories within a few years, and instead they got the Kitzmiller trial in 2005…and we all know how that turned out for them.

(Of course, one could argue that “Darwinism” sensu stricto has been dead for over a hundred years, but that would be an admission that the creationists have been flailing ignorantly against a straw man.)

Snake oil salesman, grifter, flimflammer, scoundrel, swindler…I could go on

If you’re curious about who would sign up for a Neuralink implant, as I am, you will discover that the volunteers have been seduced by lies.

“I would love to be on the cutting edge of medical science, to be able to bridge the gap of humans and technology,” says Adam Woodworth, a 40-year-old security manager for a museum in Indianapolis who suffers from short-term memory loss due to a military injury. He is swayed by the notion — one Musk promotes heavily — that Neuralink’s device may be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and brain disorders like his. “I understand there are risks, but someone has to be willing to step up and take that risk,” he says. “I am willing to be one of those people if Elon and the Neuralink team will be willing to allow me to participate.

“Also not sure if it will be possible right off the bat,” Woodworth adds, “but I am also a Tesla owner, and it would be pretty rad if I could communicate with my car using just my mind.”

Dear god. It will not help with short term memory loss. It will not treat Alzheimer’s. I imagine this is, at best, a Phase 0 trial — they’ll plug the widget into this guy’s head, and if his brain doesn’t bleed out and he doesn’t have seizures, they’ll chalk it up as a great success. That’s it.

If Musk is telling volunteers that they’ll treat Alzheimer’s and memory loss, that’s fraud, plain and simple. Medical fraud. He’s making false promises he can’t keep, that will trick people into getting invasive brain surgery.

Of course he’s lying at a phenomenal rate. He’s Elon Musk.

Yet Musk, who has poured at least $100 million of his own money into the venture, makes far broader and fantastic claims about the capabilities of his company’s implant. Apart from declaring that it “will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using their thumbs,” and “paraplegics to walk again,” he’s speculated it could eventually treat blindness, schizophrenia, depression, autism, obesity, and insomnia, and one day meld human consciousness with AI. This is in addition, of course, to creating a direct channel between minds and machines, not to mention the global internet. Oh, and did we mention that Neuralink could, according to Musk, allow for telepathic communication? (Neither Musk nor Neuralink responded to a request for comment as to whether these claims were somewhat hyperbolic.)

It will do none of those things.

Here, I have a pill that will reverse aging, restore libido, make you lose weight, increase your brain power ten-fold, and give you the power to read minds. (In small print on the label, it mentions this pill can’t do all that yet, but research is continuing that will eventually produce a pill with those powers.)

Am I a quack if I peddle a pill, claiming it has those powers, even if it has that tiny disclaimer? Should I be arrested, fined, and possibly imprisoned for that kind of fraud? I think so.

Why aren’t the police on Musk, or at least the consumer protection office, or even the better business bureau? This quack is taking advantage of people with real illnesses!