PZ’s his own special brand of abrasive and dismissive, but I went and read most of the paper, and while he’s not exactly rigorous with explaining his criticisms, I think they’re based in good ones.
While the design of the JoC website shouldn’t affect assessment of the article, the fact that a paper on such a potentially high-impact subject isn’t in a mainstream journal at all does and should send up some red flags that there might be issues with the paper that would keep it from getting past peer review.
My biggest issue with the paper is that the study isn’t controlled. They took appropriate steps to prevent contamination of their samples, but they don’t have any reasonable negative control set up that would give them some perspective on their comparison to the living bacteria.
Their “conclusions” are suggestive, rather than conclusive—it all depends on holding up these meteorites to pictures of actual bacteria and saying “Look! They look alike! And there’s some enriched carbon and stuff in these fossils!” Which could certainly be interesting, but for the paper to pass muster with mainstream science, they would need to offer a convincing test that would disprove their hypothesis were it to come out a certain way. (Hey, that sounds familiar!) As it stands, they can’t. They can only say that their observations look interesting.
Given this, the whole thing reads like they went out looking for whatever evidence they could fit to their prior hope of finding extraterrestrial life, which doesn’t immediately disprove their findings, but it certainly holds them back from credibility.
Here are the reasons to be skeptical that I picked up from that blog post:
The website of the Journal of Cosmology is ugly
The figures in the paper are “annoying”
Perhaps the claimed bacteria aren’t bacteria at all, but just squiggles.
The photos of the found bacteria aren’t at the same magnification as photos of real bacteria
It seems like the bacteria are too well-preserved for having traveled the solar system for such a long time.
Haha, maybe next they’ll find bigfoot footprints on a meteor.
PZ’s his own special brand of abrasive and dismissive, but I went and read most of the paper, and while he’s not exactly rigorous with explaining his criticisms, I think they’re based in good ones.
While the design of the JoC website shouldn’t affect assessment of the article, the fact that a paper on such a potentially high-impact subject isn’t in a mainstream journal at all does and should send up some red flags that there might be issues with the paper that would keep it from getting past peer review.
My biggest issue with the paper is that the study isn’t controlled. They took appropriate steps to prevent contamination of their samples, but they don’t have any reasonable negative control set up that would give them some perspective on their comparison to the living bacteria.
Their “conclusions” are suggestive, rather than conclusive—it all depends on holding up these meteorites to pictures of actual bacteria and saying “Look! They look alike! And there’s some enriched carbon and stuff in these fossils!” Which could certainly be interesting, but for the paper to pass muster with mainstream science, they would need to offer a convincing test that would disprove their hypothesis were it to come out a certain way. (Hey, that sounds familiar!) As it stands, they can’t. They can only say that their observations look interesting.
Given this, the whole thing reads like they went out looking for whatever evidence they could fit to their prior hope of finding extraterrestrial life, which doesn’t immediately disprove their findings, but it certainly holds them back from credibility.
Typical PZ Myers.