{"id":3622,"date":"2010-12-09T08:18:08","date_gmt":"2010-12-09T13:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=3622"},"modified":"2010-12-12T14:23:36","modified_gmt":"2010-12-12T19:23:36","slug":"perhaps-i-should-be-called-cassandra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=3622","title":{"rendered":"Perhaps I Should Be Called Cassandra"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A colleague once called me a hopeful romantic. There’s more than a grain of truth to that. So it’s ironic that the two Wikipedia entries which quote me are linked to my critiques of extraordinary claims that did not provide even ordinary evidence.<\/p>\n

The first<\/a> was my review of Ward and Brownlee’s Rare Earth<\/em>, in which I pointed out errors that cast serious doubts on their hypothesis. When I wrote the review, I didn’t know that one of their major advisors was Guillermo Gonzalez, an unabashed creationist who made his science fit his philosophy. A few things from my review must have registered, since subsequent editions corrected at least some of these errors (for example, their initial statement that both Mars and Venus are tidally locked).<\/p>\n

Yesterday I discovered that I appear in a second Wikipedia entry<\/a> about “arsenic DNA” — the purported genetic material of the fabulous beastie that NASA announced last Friday during its science-by-press-conference. This entry is fluctuating right now, as people are editing it back and forth (plus they incorrectly call me a microbiologist).\u00a0 Those of you who are keeping track may know I was an early pebble<\/a> in the avalanche of criticism that has since fallen on that work, led<\/a> by Dr. Rosemary Redfield of UBC and summarized<\/a> by Carl Zimmer in Slate<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I have more to say about the Science paper but first I must meet immovable looming deadlines. For now I will only say that I wish the work had been as exciting as its hype promised. Because I’m an old-fashioned scientist — and a hopeless romantic.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Images:<\/strong> 1st, Stick in the Mud<\/a><\/em>, Steve Jurvetson; 2nd, Outlier,<\/em> Ben Shabad<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> More, as promised, in The Agency That Cried “Awesome!”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A colleague once called me a hopeful romantic. There’s more than a grain of truth to that. So it’s ironic that the two Wikipedia entries which quote me are linked to my critiques of extraordinary claims that did not provide even ordinary evidence. The first was my review of Ward and Brownlee’s Rare Earth, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-and-culture","category-science","category-space-exploration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}