Comments on: Genome size + Cambrian Explosion = Nonsense squared.

By: Rui Monteiro

Rui Monteiro — Mon, 23 May 2011 00:16:00 +0000

The cause of Cambrian Explosion is Cognition (Nervous Systems) plus Sexual Selection. See here for more details: http://nature-sucks.blogspot.com/

By: The other jim

The other jim — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:05:55 +0000

My theory is that they are unsuccessful physicists. They are able to hold their positions by delving into that messy biology stuff (that their peers do not understand), thus they look like they are still “successfully” publishing.

By: Pinko Punko

Pinko Punko — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:26:03 +0000

Since when was BBRC a Physics journal?
BBRC is kind of like PlosOne, but before there was a PlosOne.

By: Psi Wavefunction

Psi Wavefunction — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:24:37 +0000

What part of ‘anal breakthrough‘ do these people not understand? Sheesh…
(in all seriousness, the “Anal Breakthrough Hypothesis” makes way more sense than most of the competing stuff out there, which definitely begs some Sokalising.)

Also, why to the physicists seem to insist to live in this delusion that they are a few orders of magnitude smarter than ‘those dumb biologists who can’t even solve a third order PDE’, and therefore always have something worthwhile to say about biology. Being a biologist with engineer parents leaves one quite worn out by that shit. Grrr. And most of them are utterly hopeless when faced with real biology, in all its messy, irrational, non-mathematical, statistically insane glory.

By: Alex Ishkin

Alex Ishkin — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:04:01 +0000

I don’t really get their stuff (though I tried seriously). Do these guys suppose that once upon a time in Cambrian eukaryotes suddenly have begun to enlarge their genomes and this event caused modern metazoan taxa to appear? Do they ever know about Ediakaran biota (Cambrian explosion was at least not the first ‘explosion’ of metazoan diversity)?
Moreover, their functions for genome size appear to be based on the data with such level of variability, that I don’t believe they are credible.