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Diatoms…iiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaace! [Pharyngula]

Wednesday, January 16, 2013 12:21

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(Before It's News)

You all know that the Journal of Cosmology is complete crap, right? In addition to some of the worst web design ever — it looks like a drunk clown puked up his fruit loops onto a grid of 1990s-style tables — the content is ridiculous, predictable, and credulous. Their big thing is seeing life in every space rock, or raining down from Mars, or drifting in vast clouds through the galaxy. I’ve criticized their absurd conclusions before, and jumped on the quality of their work, and in return…they photoshopped my face onto a picture of an obese woman in a negligee. Multiple times. That’s the kind of rigorous scientific thinking we’re dealing with here.

Their latest is an article claiming to have found diatoms in a meteorite (pdf). It’s the same ol’, same ol’. They have taken electron micrographs of samples from the rock, and found things that they claim look like organisms, most of which don’t at all.

But this time there’s a twist. They’ve got a picture of something that looks exactly like a diatom. A diatom that is identical to a natural, earthly species of freshwater diatom. Exactly like one. Now you or I, seeing that, would wonder why a space organism (or a Martian organism, or whatever) would evolve to look exactly like a species that evolved in a completely different environment, and how it could have converged in all its details on such remarkable similarity to a specific earthly species. Why, we might even suggest that it clearly looks like contamination. But no, not to the editors and authors at JoC (pronounced as you might expect): no, these are proof of diatoms in spaaaaaaace.

In addition, Phil Plait explains that it probably isn’t even a meteorite — it doesn’t look like a carbonaceous chondrite, and it’s of highly dubious provenance.

Are we done with anything that comes out of the word processor of Wickramasinghe yet? Or at least with anything published in that joke of a journal, the Journal of Cosmology? I am, anyway. I wouldn’t trust anything published in it.

By the way, Greg Laden found that Anthony Watts, the climate change denier, was completely taken in by this crap.