#1 An Affront to Our Collective Intelligence.
Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 12:08 am
Thank you Anguirus for showing me this, as it made me laugh and cry at the same time... I dont have online access to this edition of PNAS yet, so I cant post a full review. However I will either get it shortly, or will just go to the library tomorrow and scan it in... then post it as images. Then give it the full treatment.
[quote]Worst paper of the year?
A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencee makes the bizarre and completely unsupported claim that the two stages of the butterfly life cycle: caterpillar and volant adult, result from a hybridization event, with the caterpillar resulting from a butterfly mistakingly mating with an onycophoran (velvet worm). Instead of a single lineage evolving two different life stages, then, each stage reflects a completely independent evolutionary event.,
An article on this paper in Scientific American first explicates the theory:
In the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Donald Williamson, a wheelchair-bound 87-year-old zoologist from the University of Liverpool in England, suggests that the ancestors of modern butterflies mistakenly fertilized their eggs with sperm from velvet worms, also known as onychophorans. “People have been trying to find one solution that covers all of metamorphosis,â€
[quote]Worst paper of the year?
A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencee makes the bizarre and completely unsupported claim that the two stages of the butterfly life cycle: caterpillar and volant adult, result from a hybridization event, with the caterpillar resulting from a butterfly mistakingly mating with an onycophoran (velvet worm). Instead of a single lineage evolving two different life stages, then, each stage reflects a completely independent evolutionary event.,
An article on this paper in Scientific American first explicates the theory:
In the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Donald Williamson, a wheelchair-bound 87-year-old zoologist from the University of Liverpool in England, suggests that the ancestors of modern butterflies mistakenly fertilized their eggs with sperm from velvet worms, also known as onychophorans. “People have been trying to find one solution that covers all of metamorphosis,â€
