Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites? No. | Hacker News Reader

Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites? No.

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134 pointsaraneae62 comments

"consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s"

Is it just me or is that comment just a tad childish? I'm finding it hard to take this guy seriously, let alone the other guy.

That was exactly the point where I stopped reading -- upvoted.

Yeah, just like every university website ever.

Case in point: a couple of weeks ago I was building a web-based tool under contract for conducting studies for a university's psychology department. I sent them over a functional prototype with a note that I hadn't done any design work on it yet, and they were blown away. Some direct quotes: "that looks amazing." and "we love it".

Making comments like that is part of the shtick

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shtick

of PZ Myers when he writes blog posts. Most of his conduct in writing posts on his blog would not be considered civil or decorous conduct here on HN, but he knows his biology, and his reply to the biological aspects of the recently reported claim should be taken seriously. PZ Myers also had one of the first good analyses on the Web of the claim that a different scientist affiliated with NASA had found an "arsenic-based" life form. Not so, as PZ aptly pointed out.

Anyway, PZ continues in his blog post to write, "So let's look at the paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus." He then comments that he can't even count on links to the website for the article staying valid, because of the way the website is administered, but he proceeds to analyze the content of the paper, and to find it below the usual standard of biology papers about newly discovered microorganisms.

In other words, it is not always valid in either direction to judge a message by its messenger or its medium. Sometimes good factual points are made with less than ideal decorum.

"In other words, it is not always valid in either direction to judge a message by its messenger or its medium."

Even though that's precisely one of the things the author does.

PZ Myers has a fair bit of credibility. After years of helping deal with torrents of nonsense, I'm prepared to cut the guy a little slack on the snark front.

Also I think the key word in "it is not always valid in either direction to judge" is "always". Would you feel wrong incorporating the fact that someone had submitted a resume in badly formatted handwriting as part of your assessment of their application?

It seems to be that you apply double standards here.

On the one hand, you say that the ugliness of a website doesn't matter, it should be taken seriously nevertheless.

On the other hand, you don't take an article seriously because it contains superficial statements.

I mean, ranting is just another kind of ugliness, on language level instead of the graphical level. It's a bad first impression, that's all. I find it strange to apply different standards to both kinds of ugliness.

There are still major differences between the two, however.

Visual ugliness is often either an intrinsic quality of something or comes from a lack of effort to improve the visual quality.

Ad hominem attacks, on the other hand, are at best fallacious - they're simply illogical at their core. At worst they're signs of someone spending effort to decrease something else's appeal, in a way that is both wrong and simply mean. It's a net decrease of quality in every single way.

One of the first questions one might wonder is "If it's really poor quality, how'd it get through peer review?"

This is answered by information about the journal that it was published in.

> Ad hominem attacks, on the other hand [...] At worst they're signs of someone spending effort to decrease something else's appeal

If ranting was really extra work, it wouldn't happen so often. Ranting is actually easier than trying to convey the message objectively and fair.

The differences between a first draft and good writing are editing, editing and editing. And by editing I don't mean just finding better words here and there, but also cutting out lots of irrelevant stuff and rewriting whole paragraphs for the sake of clarity.

So a big text that contains lots of crap doesn't mean it was designed this way. It merely means that the "editing" phase was very short or has even been skipped.

It's a sign that the author took less effort rather than more – on the perfect analogy of poor website design.

> It's a net decrease of quality in every single way.

I strongly disagree. You can always strip cut out these nasty (half-)sentences and see what's left. The real content of a text doesn't magically decrease just by adding some childish/insulting stuff to it.

I'll admit you're right that ranting is easier. Hadn't thought of it that way. But:

>The real content of a text doesn't magically decrease just by adding some childish/insulting stuff to it.

It doesn't? From an information-theory standpoint, it does, because it makes the valuable parts harder to find, decreasing the overall value. From a human standpoint, it does, because it makes the valuable parts harder to find, and wastes more of our time due to reading through the worthless parts. And since time is at the very least valuable, adding worthless fluff adds to the cost to retrieve the value, decreasing its overall value.

If I had used up several pages to state all the above, would it be worth less to you than those four sentences? Would you be more likely to say "what a waste of time, they could've just said 'X'"? From a social standpoint, would it be more or less likely be voted down, or broadly ignored?

> it does, because it makes the valuable parts harder to find

I fully agree with that, as I was just pointing out that the good content is still there, although somewhat hidden. There is a mental barrier (consisting of crappy text) between the reader and the good content, making it harder to find and harder to read.

But this is, again, the perfect analogy on an ugly website, where you also have a hard time finding and reading the good content. Not because of too much text, but because of things like bad colors and fonts. And because the overall structure is hard to grasp, and because the ugliness makes you don't wanting to read into that. Those are all mental barriers, too. It's just a different kind of crap that hides the good content here. (... increasing your search effort, thus decreasing the information value)

The moral question here is whether it should matter that you have to search for the good bits. And in both cases (language as well as optical design) this question is equivalent to the question of whether we should hold up the strong value: "only content matters" (... even if its hidden behind crap).

But no matter how you answer this question, it should be the same answer for both kinds of ugliness. Otherwise you're applying double standards.

Meant to say this earlier, but:

This is interesting. I see your point, but I don't want to concede it :)

To me, visual ugliness is far far less offensive than verbal. Probably because there's so frickin' much assaulting our eyes daily, while there's less verbally, so I'm just more used to filtering things out.

This is especially strange when you consider that, in the case of the Real World, visual ugliness is typically persistent while verbal is transient... but for some reason we put up with billboards every few hundred feet along highways, every time we drive anywhere, but not ads every few minutes on the radio. Is it just that (it seems to me that) we have more choice in what we hear / produce vocally than in what we see, so we put up with it less? I.e., muting something is easier than removing / fixing / repainting it. Though for comparison's sake, I don't have a TV and I don't miss it.

---

At least part of it, for me, is that I can absorb information far more quickly visually than audibly. And I can sort out visual clutter more easily than audible clutter. I was able to parse their page in an instant, and find whatever I desired (and can search within the page for specific terms). Its ugliness didn't significantly impact my ability to interpret its information (some sites do, but rarely, and certainly not this one). But if someone had read the page's contents to me, inflecting at the wrong points or completely monotone, I would have had to sit for a half hour, listening, paying attention, and would've probably left within seconds after realizing that would be the case.

The author of the published paper in question is the Astrobiology Group Leader at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (http://spie.org/x17397.xml)

Why would he risk his career and put his reputation at stake?

shrug

Michael Behe did good work as a microbiologist and publishes in the Journal of Creation. I'm sure this guy really believes it.

He has made similar claims before that didn't pan out. Why is it risking his career if he truly believes it? It may just be a case of seeing what he wants to see.

We'll see!

My point is, why would NASA employ him as a Group Leader if he were, dare I say, delusional?

There's got to be some truth in it.

Because NASA is a big government bureaucracy, and he's been working there since 1966.

Instead of thinking that there's got to be some truth to it, think that when there's a whiff of BS and it looks like the work of a bunch of delusional cranks publishing in their own vanity journal, it's nonsense and should be ignored.

Strangely, it's not just him, though I agree it doesn't seem particularly likely to be true. The journal's editorial board seems to have people who do reasonably respectable work when it comes to their work that doesn't involve panspermia. The journal's editor-in-chief, for example, is a well-respected director at Harvard's observatory, and his "normal" papers (reporting on finds via the telescope) get published in normal journals.

It is pretty strange that there are so many big names playing along. On the other hand, there's quite a long tradition of eminent, tenured, (and often aging) scientists going a little bit off the deep end, especially in areas outside of their actual expertise.

People say things for all kinds of weird reasons, which may range from pet theories to hawking books and getting speaking gigs.

  > On the other hand, there's quite a long tradition of
  > eminent, tenured, (and often aging) scientists going a
  > little bit off the deep end, especially in areas outside
  > of their actual expertise.

Look no further than Watson and Crick.

>Because NASA is a big government bureaucracy, and he's been working there since 1966.

To be fair, any other academic institution would have given him tenure. The point of tenure in those systems is precisely so that faculty can say batshit insane ideas with the hope that the odd lunatic will be right, or at least invite discussion.

Copying a comment of jneal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2292467

  This guy has some interesting information:

http://m.gawker.com//5777460/fox-news-publishes-fake-exclusi....

  Something seems odd here - the guy has made this same announcement in the past.

---------------

Some additional research from myself:

The link says that this is not the first time that Hoover made an announcement like this. So I tried to find some of them and got these:

1997: http://www.panspermia.org/hoover.htm

2004: http://www.panspermia.org/hoover2.htm

and: http://www.panspermia.org/hoover3.htm

2010: http://www.panspermia.org/hoover4.htm

(And just to be sure, the older of the articles is in Internet at least from 1998: http://web.archive.org/web/19981202091131/http://www.pansper... )

It wouldn't be the first time a smart, accomplished person has espoused a weird belief. See Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer: http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscie...

http://journalofcosmology.com/

Not to judge a book by its cover, but... seriously?

This journal is going under:

http://daviddobbs.posterous.com/journal-of-cosmology-going-o...

From Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/fy4w5/journal_of_co...

I think it is safe to ignore articles published in this journal.

I thought, trying to be charitable - "it's [http://journalofcosmology.com/] not that bad, OK - not the worst, table based, outset borders, kinda minimalist maybe". Then \BAM\ the background loaded and assaulted my visual cortex.

While it is strange that he would publish his paper in the Journal of Cosmology, it doesn't change the validity (or non-validity) of the facts. I'm looking forward to seeing some serious analysis of the paper instead of snarky ad hominem attacks like this article.

Yeah, it opens with snark. But then the article goes through the arguments and figures in the paper and refutes the hypothesis, so it's not empty snark.

Publishing a paper in a fake journal does damage the validity of the claims. Papers with sufficient evidence for their claims can get published in journals with strict peer review policies. By choosing such a crap journal the authors are essentially admitting that Nature or Science would never accept their arguments.

The only objective criticisms I saw in the article were about the SEMs not being to scale and the preservation state of the "organisms". Other than that, it seems like it was snark at the beginning, snark in the middle, and snark at the end.

He directly addresses their key evidence: the pictures of the supposed organisms. He interprets the images as inorganic and and calls the paper's claims pareidolia. If outside observers look at the same data and don't see what you're arguing for, you're not making your case successfully.

"Papers with sufficient evidence for their claims can get published in journals with strict peer review policies."

Do you have any evidence that this is actually true?

The scientific method is based on the principle that peer review winnows out false hypotheses. If n observers each detect a falsehood with probability p then the probability of missing the falsehood is (1-p)^n. More reviewers and more accurate individual reviewers decrease the rate of false hypotheses being published. There are many flaws in the peer review system as it exists today. That said, journals with more peer review will publish fewer falsehoods than journals with less peer review.

Again, do you have any actual evidence that what you are saying is true?

Are you asking for a study? I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say.

"Are you asking for a study? I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say."

Yes. Every few months I see a new study about how academic research grants are handed out more or less at random, how journals are heavily biased toward positive results, how journals are biased toward authors with previous citations, etc.

All this seriously challenges the claim that if you have sufficient evidence you will get published by a top journal.

Similarly, is there any evidence for the claim that, "If n observers each detect a falsehood with probability p then the probability of missing the falsehood is (1-p)^n."

Go ask Kitty Genovese about the validity of this formula.

The Kitty Genovese killing isn't a good example of the bystander effect, as the police were contacted at least once during the attack and most people who heard it could not see it happening.

http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/uploads/MarkLevine200706...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037%2F0003-066X.62.6.555

From the abstract:

> Using archive material we show that there is no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive.

(Further, why mention the bystander effect at all? It's a little confusing)

The question is not "are journals biased?" The question is, are more respected journals less likely to publish a falsehood? If the "better" journals have more accurate reviewers or more reviewers then yeah, they will publish fewer falsehoods.

Re: the formula (1-p)^n. It's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution . If the observers are independent then the formula holds. If they're not then it holds approximately according to how dependent the different observers are.

"The question is not "are journals biased?" The question is, are more respected journals less likely to publish a falsehood?"

What you said originally was that if the author's evidence was sufficient then he would have been able to get in published in a better journal. But if you're admitting that journals are biased, then surely you must see that your original assertion doesn't always --or maybe even often-- hold. Maybe it's true, but I'm certainly not willing to accept it on faith.

"If the "better" journals have more accurate reviewers or more reviewers then yeah, they will publish fewer falsehoods."

Your definition of 'better' journals sounds like a tautology. How do you know that 'better' journals have better reviewers? Can you actually prove that having better reviewers is what makes 'better' journals better?

I'd certainly be willing to be persuaded by evidence, but right now I believe that the best journals are the ones with the best vetting process about as much as I believe the best vodka is the one that costs the most, the world's best author is the one with the most sales, etc.

It does, however, change the validity of the "peer reviewed" status the paper has received, and thereby undermines the entire reason this paper has gotten so much attention.

If the journal is not credible, has published unreliable science in the past, has a stated agenda, and does not have an above-board peer-review process, then it is no more worthy of trust than the World News Daily.

Undermining the credibility of the journal a paper is published in is fair game when the credibility of the journal is the only reason any credibility is assigned to the paper.

I think the fact that it has any credibility at all is more due to the fact that the author works at NASA.

Again, I'm not saying that the paper is any good. I'm just saying that people should refute the claims in the paper instead of attacking the delivery method.

This was done as well. However, one should look at all the available evidence to inform one's analysis. Printing in a third rate journal is the first clue that something is very wrong.

  > I'm just saying that people should refute the claims in
  > the paper instead of attacking the delivery method.

At the risk of merely echoing what's been said countless times: (perceived) journal quality is simply a reliable heuristic for judging paper quality. Sure, some stuff published in Nature is crap, and some third-tier journals publish important research every now and then.

But in 90% of all cases, the paper-journal quality correlation works rather well.

I've seen some surprising things claimed on the cover of the National Enquirer. I hope that they are investigated seriously rather than dismissed with a snarky tone, because if Elvis is really alive on the Moon it would have profound cross-disciplinary implications.

>While it is strange that he would publish his paper in the Journal of Cosmology, it doesn't change the validity (or non-validity) of the facts.

It effectively does. Suppose the author had good, convincing evidence of bacterial life. He wouldn't send the data to a third rate journal.

Tossing on my Bayesian hat for a moment...

The journal that a paper is published in should absolutely affect our assessment of the facts in it - if the journal tends to publish only bullshit, we should mark any article that appears in that journal with a pretty high bullshit factor. That's not to say that it can't be overcome, but it's still a mark against.

I'd personally argue that the a priori likelihood of us finding a rock that fell to earth from outer space that happens to contain bacteria inside it (given that we know life is relatively rare) is so low that, coupled with the shady journal it's published in, the claim is so extraordinary that it would be very difficult to provide certain enough evidence to make me think it's true. As in, I'd probably put the probability that this is a straight up fraudulent hoax higher than the probability that this is actually true evidence of alien life.

At first while I was reading this article I was really REALLY bummed out. I was so excited when they discovered extra terrestrial life that, even though the initial link posted on HN came from Fox News and the second came from Yahoo!, I still believed it. I'm just that big an optimist.

This guy put me in my place, though. The Journal of Cosmology does look like a complete and utter joke of a website. Fox may as well just take to syndicating Nexus magazine.

It's not all bad news though! Just as I was beginning to get seriously down in the dumps I saw that, NO JOKE, I'm the 999,999th visitor to scienceblogs.com!

Not only that, but I have been RANDOMLY SELECTED to become the possible winner of an Apple product! That news really bouyed my spirits!

In all seriousness: if this dude wants to go round shitting on other people's websites he should reconsider his choice in 3rd party ad network.

I read the paper in it's entirety today.

Hoover is a sharp scientist and he has authored a very compelling piece that on the surface appears to reinforce it's central tenant - that the structures documented are not indigenous to Earth.

If that is in fact validated, the remaining debate is about methods and interpretation of the ESEM, FSEM and EDS results. That portion of the paper appears to be very well thought out and presented.

What's also very good, there is a clear and concise method for reproducing the results and the invitation of so many others to do just that.

This thing has legs.

It seems telling to me that NASA had a major build up and press conference to discuss findings of exobiotic-like life, yet quietly does nothing for evidence of actual exobiotic life.

do you mean xenobiotic?

No, I didn't, but that would be appropriate, too. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/exobiology

And I would love to know what I was down-voted for. Please tell me it wasn't because somebody thought it really should be xenobiology (and, no, xd, I don't think it was you :).

But I want to believe :(

By the way, why does everyone seem to be poo-pooing that arsenic discovery from a few months ago? Did something about it turn out to be fake?

Pretty much everything about the "arsenic-based life" claim turned out to be examples of poor scientific lab technique and poor thinking. There is NOT acceptance in the scientific community that arsenic-based life has been found.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/its_not_an_arseni...

http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-ba...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/arsenic-life-under...

http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/

Carl Sagan once fought for the right and asked that it be treated as an honor or duty that every scientist examine claims no matter how unrealistic in order to expose the greater amount of people to the scientific method and basic science. Carl Sagan's debunking of Velikovsky was just as snarky if not more so.

For those of ill-uniformed..Velikovsky had similar theories.

Both sides of the Carl Sagan and Velikovsky affair:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/velikovsky.htm

Some interesting reading as Velikovsky also was a Hoyle believer..

P.Z. Meyers is a biology Shock Jock. Thats all. He says whatever will get traffic.

Is he wrong?

Should be, JOC has 5000 scientist reviewing, and 500 vetting.

Source?

Comment was derived from the below.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/aliens-riding-mete...

http://daviddobbs.posterous.com/journal-of-cosmology-going-o...

Rosie Redfield has now voiced some valid concerns on processing.

Huh? That link says they invited 5,000 scientists to "review" the paper after it was published as part of some kind of publicity stunt.

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