No, passing peer review is not the scientific equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. . . I confess that decades ago as a Hearst Magazines fledgling I would on occasion pass by, and with some curiosity, peek in the glassed-in Good …

“Because findings published in peer-reviewed journals affect patient care, public policy and the authors’ academic promotions, journal editors contend that new scientific information should be published in a peer-reviewed journal before it is presented to doctors and the public. That message, however, has created a widespread misimpression that passing peer review is the scientific equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.” – Lawrence K. Altman, M.D.

No, passing peer review is not the scientific equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. . . I confess that decades ago as a Hearst Magazines fledgling I would on occasion pass by, and with some curiosity, peek in the glassed-in Good Housekeeping Institute where the coveted seal of approval was given to mattresses able to withstand umpteen thrusts, to pantyhose, pots and other utilitarian items. And how can I forget running into Johnny Weissmuller in the hall one day? The seal meant something – even Tarzan wanted to be associated. But to help me flesh-out what scientific peer review IS exactly, I contacted the Tarzan of science and technology historians, David F. Noble.

David Noble is currently a tenured professor in the Department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. His activism about matters involving the politics of science first surfaced in the early 1970s when he says he was “coerced” by the University of Rochester to sign away rights to his doctoral thesis in history in order to get his PhD.

Noble’s undergraduate degree is in history and chemistry from the University of Florida. On and off for 10 years he worked as a biochemist at Tufts, Purdue and the University of Rochester Medical School.

Noble went on to teach at MIT in the Science, Technology and Society department, beginning in 1978; he was denied tenure in 1984, fired “for his ideas and his actions in support of those ideas”. Noble’s ideas were at odds with the escalating corporatization of universities and MIT was a university with tight corporate ties. He said the reason he was denied tenure was political and described MIT’s tenure process as “ad hoc”.

MIT Institute Professor Noam Chomsky commented at the time that Noble was “too radical for MIT”. Nevertheless, Noble sued MIT for $1.5 million and although he later dropped the suit, he did manage to get the court to make public the case documents and order MIT to review its tenure practices. The American Historical Society rallied to Noble’s side, condemning MIT’s decision to dismiss him.

Noble moved next to the Smithsonian, where as curator of industrial automation he was fired again, this time for including the only extant hammer used by the Luddites in the 19th century — which also exposed his Luddite leanings (Noble does not communicate by email, for example). At Drexel Institute he was tenured but chose to snip the ties after five years and take a position at York University where he’s been for almost 20 years — although not without controversy.

In fact, he’s been a champion of social justice throughout his career. Acts of courage (partial list) include: co-founding the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest with Ralph Nader in 1983 to address the nightmare of universities selling out to corporations; attention to the issue of science and misogyny; and challenging religious bias in academia.

Regarding the latter, Noble, a Jew, protested York University’s policy of cancelling classes on Jewish holidays by cancelling his own classes on Muslim holidays, noting that to be fair, classes for all religions should really be cancelled on respective holidays if Jewish holidays were observed. In 2004, Noble took the matter to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and York University was forced to get rid of its policy.

A second action involved Noble’s grievance over reprisals from the first action, i.e., his academic reputation was damaged because he had challenged York University over its religious bias. In 2008, he was awarded $2,500 as a settlement.

In a third action, still before the court, Noble says he suspects “money laundering” by various pro-Israel lobbying organizations. He also says that if he wins the $19 million lawsuit, he will feel that he has “made a difference”.

And then there was the lawsuit Noble brought and won regarding his being denied an endowed chair at Simon Fraser University, established in the name of the founder of Canada’s Social Democratic party — an email was uncovered from SFU’s president to vice president saying, “I’d avoid this appointment like the plague.” The humanities department at SFU and the Canadian Association of University Teachers thought Noble was THE GUY for the job and stood by him, with CAUT attesting that Noble’s “academic freedom had been violated”. Noble sued for “damages for loss of income, past and future; damages for loss of reputation; aggravated damages and punitive damages and costs”. In 2007 he received a public apology from SFU plus an undisclosed sum of money.

David Noble is the author of these books: America by Design; Forces of Production; Smash Machines, not People; Digital Diploma Mills; A World Without Women; Progress Without People; The Religion of Technology; and Beyond the Promised Land.

Click to enlarge

My conversation with David Noble follows.

Suzan Mazur: I’ve been focusing on abuse inside the peer review system in recent articles, which has spiraled out of control – to the extent that at the low end we now find virtual death squads on Internet blogs out to destroy scientists who have novel theories. They pretend to be battling creationism but their real job is to censor the free flow of ideas on behalf of the science establishment. The science establishment rewards bloody deeds like these by putting the chief assassin on the cover of The Humanist magazine, for example.

But you’ve written in “Regression on the Left” that the problem IS the peer review system itself. Why do you think so?

David Noble: When you say THE problem is the peer review system – the peer review system in my view is doing what it was designed to do — censor. And filter. Peer review is a system of prior censorship, prior review – prior meaning prior to publication. So the idea of abusing the peer review system sort of adds insult to injury, because the peer review system itself is injurious.

Suzan Mazur: The first scientific journal was published in 1665 by the Royal Society of London. Would you briefly timeline events from there, highlighting what the original plan was for a postwar National Science Foundation?

David Noble: My understanding is that peer review in its modern form is very recent, dating from World War II. The participants in what we now call science were people with resources, usually independent wealth. When we go back to the Royal Society we’re talking about a very small community of people.

What happens with World War II, for the first time, the taxpayer is underwriting the bulk of scientific research. That never happened before. During WWII – this is in the United States – the government set up an operation called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), headed by Vannevar Bush, vice president of MIT. The government did this to essentially enlist the support of non-governmental institutions, such as universities – private universities as well as private corporations – to do research and development for the war effort.

The government’s own research laboratories were clearly inadequate for that task. So what they did was magnify the scope of the state’s research and development efforts by bringing in these extra-governmental institutions.

The government invented the contract system. They contracted with private actors, private institutions to do the work for the state for the war

Suzan Mazur: Prior to WWII scientists worked within the military and then after the war the government agreed to finance scientists working out of their own labs.

David Noble: Right. Before the war most research was funded by private foundations. And there were many people in the scientific community. . . I make very little distinction between the scientific community and the corporate community. Those are very close links.

Vannevar Bush, for example, was the vice president of MIT but he was also a director of AT&T, Raytheon, etc. Bush et al. didn’t want the government involved in funding of research because they understood correctly that if the government was involved, then the government, and through the government, the taxpayer would have some say about what was done with that money, what the research agenda would look like, etc. There was real resistance throughout the 1920s, 1930s to the state funding research precisely for that reason.

Suzan Mazur: You already had the National Academy of Sciences.

David Noble: In terms of the scale of operations, that was very small. WWII was the watershed. What happened was the invention of the contract system by the OSRD and there was almost immediately controversy over who was getting grants for these contracts. Since the makeup of this committee was pretty much representative of the elite universities and also the largest corporations, they got the lion share of contract work.

Many outside that charmed circle said this was unequal, a privileged allocation of resources, etc. University of Nebraska said: Why don’t we get some of this money, why does it all go to Harvard and Stanford and Chicago? And small companies who were not in that charmed circle made the same complaints. This controversy raged during WWII.

The second question had to do with patents, and I’m not going off on a tangent here. This is all related. What the companies did – and this is extortion – they said yes, we will build the tanks for the government but we want the patents on the work we develop. And if you don’t give us the patents, then we’re not going to do it. And so the OSRD say fine, we’ll give you the patents. That was another very, very contentious issue.

Again, they were getting patents, monopoly rights to products developed by the taxpayer. So all of this is raging.

By about 1943-1944, there was discussion about what the postwar scientific establishment would look like. By this time, the corporations and the universities and the scientists who had been reluctant to take federal funds for fear of taxpayer involvement were now so enamored of the largess that they didn’t want to give it up. And they said, we can’t go backwards — this is the new game — we are going to be taking taxpayer money. But we don’t want the taxpayer involved in what we do. This is a fundamental challenge to the whole. . .

Suzan Mazur: And this is what exists today.

David Noble: Yes, but what happened first is that Harley Kilgore, a senator from West Virginia, set up a plan for a “National Science Foundation” whereby the taxpayer — an ordinary citizen, a non-scientist — would sit on committees and panels overseeing the allocation of research funds.

In response to that, Vannevar Bush and his friends put together a counterproposal calling for a “National Research Foundation” — which became more or less what we have in today’s National Science Foundation.

The Vannevar Bush et al. legislation said essentially that science would be funded by the taxpayer but controlled by scientists. Again, scientists – this is important to emphasize – are not simply scientists, but scientists and the corporations they work for.

Suzan Mazur: Also, to get this government funding scientists have to agree to do a few things for the government. Ensure national security and the health and economic security of the nation. There’s a quid pro quo. It’s a way of further silencing scientists.

David Noble: Well it’s certainly been used that way. What I’m saying is something simpler. There was a problem with the way the committees and panels overseeing the allocation of research funds would be set up. The problem had a name and the name is DEMOCRACY. The fundamental tenet of the democratic system is that the taxpayers funding something have control over what’s done with the money.

Harry Truman said it was the most undemocratic piece of legislation he’d ever seen and vetoed it. It went through minor changes and became what we have today — a scientific establishment run by scientists with very little political oversight. The key thing is how they kept the taxpayer out was through peer review.
Suzan Mazur: It wasn’t until the 1960s that science journals were turned into a money-making racket when the federal government gave its blessing to a per-page fee for publication. Scientists were not only writing articles for the journals for free but now there was a per-page fee for publication. Then the number of science journals increased leading to competition between journals and to mediocre science.

Are you saying such a system should be scrapped? Should the peer review journal system be scrapped?

David Noble: I think so. Oh yeah.

Suzan Mazur: Should anything replace it?

David Noble: If the taxpayer is paying for the research, why shouldn’t there be a representative array of citizens on all scientific panels? And again, going back to your first question, the purpose of peer review is prior censorship and I believe very strongly that if people want to criticize something that you write or I write, they have every right to do that AFTER it’s published not before it’s published. To me that’s the critical issue.

Suzan Mazur: People have a right to have their views out there

David Noble: Right. Now what happened with peer review that began within this establishment to keep democracy out then became the gold standard for everything. So, for example, I’ve published seven books, I’ve published countless articles, but I’ve never ever nor will I ever publish in a peer-reviewed journal or a peer-reviewed publication ever.

According to my university I have no publications. This is literally true. The only thing now that is reviewed are peer-reviewed publications. And the fact that none of my work is peer reviewed — it might be considered, but secondarily.

Suzan Mazur: Do you have tenure? Does that make you ineligible for tenure?

David Noble: No, fortunately for me I’m close to the exit. I’m a tenured full professor. But that’s the situation now in every field.

Suzan Mazur: Has it affected your salary?

David Noble: No no no. What I’m saying is for the people coming through now, this is the game.

Suzan Mazur: Getting back to the current dilemma, a secretive peer review system with hundreds of thousands of private for-profit and professional society journal editors, editorial board members and reviewers of scientific publications — none of whom get paid. And a scientific journal publisher like Wiley, for example – a publicly listed company – with $1.6 billion in revenue for 2009.

Elsevier, the science publisher — also publicly-traded — puts out 2,000 journals and describes itself as “a global community of 7,000 journal editors, 70,000 editorial board members, 300,000 reviewers and 600,000 authors”. All working for free?

Isn’t it strange that so many busy scientists write these staggeringly complex journal papers for free, that they pay for their articles to be published and thousands of dollars extra if they want the public to read them, even though it’s the public who funds the research? And that journals continue to operate in secrecy about revenues and operating costs, with some of them now making millions of dollars? Isn’t it strange? They work as slaves, basically.

Is there a gaming of the system going on?

David Noble: What I’m saying is these commercial interests have insinuated themselves into the professional evaluation system. Why do people publish? They publish primarily to promote their own careers. Because that’s the measure.

Most of what’s published shouldn’t even be published. It’s published for that purpose. And very few people read it.

Suzan Mazur: Very few people can read it.

David Noble: Or have any interest in reading it. Let me go back to something really simple. When I got my PhD in 1974 from the University of Rochester, I was required to give my dissertation to University Microfilms – a private company that processes and sells dissertations of theses.

Suzan Mazur: Did you have to pay for this?

David Noble: No. I didn’t have to pay, but in order to get a PhD from the University of Rochester I had to sign a commercial contract with University Microfilms giving them my dissertation, and I received nothing from them. And they were going to sell it.

Suzan Mazur: Incredible.

David Noble: So I said to the University of Rochester, I’m not going to sign the contract. And the University of Rochester said to me — then you cannot get your degree.

Suzan Mazur: Incredible.

David Noble: This was in 1973 and 1974.

Suzan Mazur: And how did that play out?

David Noble: What we’re talking about is the insinuation of a commercial enterprise into the credentialing process. It turned out that that was standard in every institution of higher education in the United States.

Suzan Mazur: You got the PhD.

David Noble: Anyone who has gone through that gauntlet – you’re done, you’re finished with the thesis. The margins are correct. You’ve got the right font. You’re done. You’re out of there. And they say: “NOW SIGN THIS“.

And I said, “NO. I’M NOT GOING TO SIGN IT.”

And they said, “IF YOU DON’T SIGN IT, YOU DON’T GET THE DEGREE.”

Well, that’s called coercion. So I signed the contract.

Pressure was brought to bear on University Microfilms that they should at least be forced to give royalties. And that did come to pass.

I’ve never gotten any royalties, but the point is, that’s the way they finessed it. The university said this is an aid to us because of bibliographical control – that this private company is doing this. A private company had insinuated itself in the credentialing process. And that’s what you’re talking about.

Suzan Mazur: Isn’t even stranger that bankers run the boards of these big scientific publishing companies, like at Wiley, for example, where the CEO of Moody’s and the former CFO of Dow Jones, etc., etc., are on the board? The content of the publication is left up to the journal editors and reviewers, meaning, in essence, the corporate publisher is passing along to the public information directly untested by it and endorsed by the bankers.

Here’s a note from Wiley’s website:

“We are responsible to our shareholders, who should realize a fair return on their investments. Investors can rely on a highly capable leadership team and an independent Board of Directors distinguished by their commitment to effective governance, ethical behavior, and integrity in all that we do.”

Wiley also says:

“We are responsible to our authors and partners who collaborate with us to create high-quality products and services, and who deserve appropriate recognition and compensation for their efforts. We are responsible to our colleagues whom we respect as human beings first, professionals second.”

BUT THEY DON’T SAY THEY DON’T PAY THE SCIENTISTS!

David Noble: Right. That’s the system. Just like they didn’t pay people who were producing PhDs, which became the commodity, essentially, that was being sold.

Suzan Mazur: But don’t you see that as a real problem, where the board of directors of these major scientific publishers making billions of dollars — publicly-traded companies – are bankers?

David Noble: What people would say is, well, these commercial enterprises publish our work. And the reason they get away with it is because they’ve implicated themselves, insinuated themselves into the credentialing and professional evaluation process. So that every academic, every scientist has to publish.

Suzan Mazur: But these bankers don’t know the content and they’re passing it along to the public. That’s the problem.

David Noble: It’s one of the problems. You say these editors are saying we don’t get paid. What I would say to you is, the way they get paid is in their career advancement. That’s what we’re talking about. The insinuation of these commercial interests into that process. That’s how it works.

Suzan Mazur: Some think that as hard copy journals begin to go extinct in the Digital Age, peer review complications will also fall to the wayside. But even online open-access journals are peer reviewed. And authors who get rejected without satisfactory explanation will still have no recourse but to submit to another journal.

Would you say this constitutes a violation of public forum law – content-based speech restriction – because journal editors and reviewers are publicly funded scientists?

David Noble: I don’t know about law – a specific statute.

Suzan Mazur: Is this a First Amendment issue, something Congress might need to investigate? Because scientists are publicly funded. To not give a proper explanation for why a paper is being rejected. . .

David Noble: Let’s put it in a larger context — 90% of research done in universities, even private universities – is paid by the taxpayer. Any company can come to the university, lay down some lunch money and leverage that 90% and in exchange get contractual obligations for prior review before publication. Non-disclosure agreements. Licensing rights. That’s the whole system.

Suzan Mazur: It’s all for sale.

David Noble: IT’S ALL FOR SALE.

In 1980, the Birch Bayh-Robert Dole amendment to the Patent Act

was passed. This is another watershed. The Bayh-Dole amendment laid to rest the controversy that began in WWII over the patenting of publicly-funded research. Up until 1980, it remained ambiguous.

What the Bayh-Dole amendment said was that the universities automatically now own all patent rights on publicly-funded research. What that meant was that universities were now in the patent-holding business and they could license private industry and in that way give them the rights over the results of the research funded by the taxpayer. It was the biggest give-away in American history.

Most scientists work for universities. Universities from 1980 on established intellectual property policies which said that they universities as institutions, as corporations, own the research done by employees. This is what private companies had been doing since the turn of the 20th century.

You’re a researcher at a university. You do some research and you decide that there’s something in there that’s of value – the university owns it. And you can maybe cut a deal with the university. The university wants to sell the rights and maybe they’ll give you a little piece of it.

If a private company has put in some money to that research effort, they have a contract that gives them rights. One of the rights is PRE-PUBLICATION REVIEW. They want to see the research, check it out for anything that’s commercially viable and they can censor. They can say, we don’t want you saying anything about that. THIS IS ROUTINE. THIS IS THE STATE-OF-THE-ART RIGHT NOW.

Suzan Mazur: Incredible. Is there a way of breaking up the “academic mafias” so that discovery and the free flow of ideas prevails and individual researchers have a shot at being funded and having their ideas taken seriously?

David Noble: Well, you’d have to revoke the Bayh-Dole amendment.

One stop shopping on this is a book by Jennifer Washburn called Universities Inc. – it’s a good chronology of this whole sea change with Bayh-Dole, etc. This is an important part of the story. From every angle, the journals, University Microfilms, all of the commercialization of research – from every angle there’s commercial usurpation of the whole scientific enterprise.

Suzan Mazur: The Wall Street Journal ran a shocking piece in 2005 discussing the fact that scientists were spending even more money hiring ghostwriters to write their papers in an attempt to “pile up high-profile publications, the main currency of advancement”. According to the WSJ, these ghostwriters whipping up journal articles for the scientists were sometimes employed by communications firms charging $30,000, and the firms were part of larger companies like Thompson Corp. and Reed Elsevier. Would you comment?

David Noble: Well, it doesn’t surprise me at all. The pharmaceutical industry, they write the articles. There’s a guy named David Healy, a very well known, he’s a psychiatrist. He’s an expert on SSRIs – antidepressants. He’s written a lot about this.

What happens is the pharmaceutical companies actually write the articles and then put the academic’s name on it – which is similar to what you’re saying. How can they get away with that? Well, the academic gets a publication out of it, even though it’s not anything they wrote.

Suzan Mazur: Right. But the nuances are very important in these papers and so this is a very dangerous practice.

David Noble: Well of course. I’ll tell you the story about my attempt to get my first book published. I’m a historian not a scientist. I wrote a book about the corporatization, the commercialization of science called America by Design. I sent it to Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Oxford University Press and a number of others. They ALL rejected it after sending it out to anonymous peer reviewers who had this to say and that to say. Then I sent it to an editor of historical works at Knopf, a private company, who liked the book and made a contract with me – no peer review. The book was published by Knopf. After the book was published, the same academic presses put in bids for the paperback rights and it was published under the imprint of Oxford University Press.

I did four books like that with Knopf. Knopf published the hardback and Oxford published the paperback. Knopf published without any peer review. The lesson for me was learned very early. Peer review would have blocked the publication of my book.

Suzan Mazur: You’ ve said “[I]t is perhaps time for the Left once again to put science in perspective.” That the Left criticizing the informed critics of science as participating in “anti-science” is a sign that the Left really needs to “return to the revolution”. Would you comment further?

David Noble: What I mean there is, and this is what I outline in that article, the Left grows out of a critique of religion in the beginning of the 19th and end of the 18th century. And science was the substitute. They substituted science for religion.

Suzan Mazur: You also say those roots are intertwined with mysogynism.

David Noble: Ok. That’s another issue. Let’s keep it simple. The point here is that science became like God. But since WWII, in part because of Hiroshima and other events, other products of science, critique of science became a very serious matter. And the Left was very much involved in looking anew at looking at science as political. And scientists as human beings and as people with interests, etc. So they de-mythologized science.

It went by many different names. Social construction of science, whatever. For decades people were, and still in some quarters are, looking very critically at this whole enterprise. And then along comes this global warming campaign. And you have these people like George Monbiot and others acting as if there had never been any critical examination of science.

Al Gore – his whole theme is propaganda. A consensus of scientists. Well, when you have a consensus of scientists, that should set off alarms. That scientists shouldn’t be consensual. There should be all sorts of controversy in science.

Suzan Mazur: You’ve also got scientists in evolutionary biology who pound on the creationists because they don’t have fresh discoveries themselves. What they’re doing is making an industry out of bashing the creationists – instead of improving the science. That’s what’s happening on the science blogs, where you get these virtual death squads opposing any science that veers from Darwin orthodoxy. Characters purporting to be atheist scientists who are actually violent Darwin religious cultists censoring the free flow of ideas. Making statements like, “I’m always happy to see a fellow hang himself”

That’s the peer review that’s now popular. It’s degenerated into a bloody massacre.

David Noble: Tribalism is rampant. The idea that people still hold is that science is this community of inquirers and that they review one another’s work has never been true. It’s always been mythical. . . .

The peer review thing, the reason why it works is because people’s careers are implicated in it. Anyone who wants to be promoted or get a job has to SUBMIT to this regime. I never did But I’m the exception. And I come out of a different moment in time perhaps. There’s no way I could probably get a PhD today. There’s certainly no way I could have become an academic. No way. That’s what’s going on now. People might have concerns about this, but they have no choice but to SUBMIT.

That’s what they’re told. So those anonymous peer reviewers have absolute decisive power over people’s professional lives.

Suzan Mazur: So you’re saying that one way we can change this is to get the public onto the National Science Foundation and government science panels.

David Noble: Yes.

My criticism of peer review, which for me is no big deal, turns out to be unique. Nobody’s talking about this. When George Monbiot attacks Alexander Cockburn by saying that the stuff Cockburn is referring to was not peer reviewed, and I say what kind of an idiot is Monbiot.
David Dixon was a writer for Science and Nature. . . There was a time when there were science journalists who were alert to this and understood the politics of science. But when this whole climate change thing came down the pike, all of these self-interested people – Monbiot had a book to sell. All the environmentalists are getting probably millions of dollars in foundation money to peddle this. And they’re still doing it even though the whole thing has collapsed. And it’s completely disqualifying the public by saying it all depends on the IPPC. It all depends on peer-reviewed journals. That’s what they were saying.

When you look at all this sordid stuff at East Anglia University about climate change. People begin asking: And this is the foundation of the whole game? It’s like the Left just went to sleep.

Suzan Mazur: People have been bought off.

David Noble: Right. And when Alex Cockburn and I and Denis Rancourt raised questions about it, we were just pilloried by the Left, which is mindboggling.

Suzan Mazur: It continues. The attack by the so-called Left regarding the questioning of science and peer review. They say this is the system we have – you think we’re going to throw away thousands and thousands of papers and start from scratch?

David Noble: Well the whole thing’s corrupt.

Suzan Mazur: Yes. We’d better pull out of the nose dive as soon as we possibly can. No scientist I’ve spoken to thinks that is doable or a good idea.

David Noble: Peer review makes things so easy for people who are evaluating. All they have to say is that’s a peer-reviewed article. End of story. Gold. They don’t have to actually read the stuff.
So, suppose I’m up for promotion and the dean says, oh look he’s got six peer-reviewed publications. Well they’ve been peer-reviewed, I don’t have to read them. You see what I’m saying? Takes them off the hook.

Suzan Mazur: It’s frightening, very dangerous.

David Noble: Let me tell you this, you’ll be amused. York University is the third-largest university in Canada. This past year they amalgamated a number of different faculties into The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, which is the biggest academic faculty in Canada. And they hired this guy with much fanfare from outside to become the new dean.

The president announced his appointment with a lot of trumpets. And he’s described as a renowned scholar of Chinese history. Well, I said that’s interesting. I wonder who this guy is. And I start looking. A renowned scholar of Chinese history – let’s see what he’s written. I couldn’t find anything. And I said, this is strange.

I happen to know some real historians of China. I called them up and asked, have you ever heard of this guy? They said no. The long and the short of it is – the guy is virtually unpublished in the field of Chinese history. He’s unknown in the field.

So a group of faculty took out an anonymous Gmail account called York Faculty Concerned About the Future of York University and exposed the fraud, accused the president of fraud. Here’s what happened – NOTHING.

He was made the dean anyway without faculty opposition. Meanwhile, the university hired outside lawyers to sue Google, Bell and Rogers, the main Internet Providers, to try to get the identity of the people who did the expose. That’s what happened.

But the most important thing is there was no outcry. That was it. The most egregious academic fraud I’d ever experienced. Why was there no outcry? It was all confirmed. The university said well it was a mistake by the media relations people, acknowledging that the guy had no publications. He’s still the dean. He’s the guy who’s reviewing everybody else’s CVs and dossiers for promotion and hiring.

Suzan Mazur: Did they put him in charge because he’d be compliant?

David Noble: I think there are other reasons, but the point is he has no scholarly credentials.

Suzan Mazur: Incredible.

David Noble: It is incredible. But the point is he’s the dean. That’s it. Why was there no uproar? And here’s the reason. Because all the faculty have no scholarly credibility either. There’s no other explanation. They’re all playing these games.

WHERE ARE THE REAL SCHOLARS? There aren’t any. Everyone’s either broken or bought. There’s complete conformity within the community.

Suzan Mazur is the author of Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Her interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her team of the 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints at Laetoli. Suzan Mazur’s reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
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While the hacked emails episode several months ago revealing attempts by scientists to withhold information about global warming from publication has put the matter of peer review under scrutiny like never before , secrecy in peer review continues …

While the hacked emails episode several months ago revealing attempts by scientists to withhold information about global warming from publication has put the matter of peer review under scrutiny like never before, secrecy in peer review continues to be upheld by the science establishment as a good thing rather than seen for what it is – a brake on the flow of ideas, a reminder that rogue scientists face rejection by powerful forces, ostracism and other tortures.

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini report colleagues attempted to silence them from publishing in their new book that Darwin’s claim was wrong about natural selection. Some of these dark forces afflicting Fodor were brought to light in a chapter in my own book The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry.

So why not just thrash these ideas out in the open as in other professional fields and properly pay scientists to write reviews instead of sending the journal money off to Wiley? Maybe then science referees (reviewers) would take time from their academic responsibilities to actually read papers submitted – particularly those from the unaffiliated.

In my previous story on peer review, I posed the question of whether a science peer review system based on secret submission policies benefits the American public who fund science (it does not), and I included correspondence between the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the authors of several papers submitted months ago for publication by National Academy of Sciences member Lynn Margulis. One of those papers still awaits publication and Margulis, who says she “only wants to see that real science, open to those who want to participate, is well done, discussed critically without secrecy and properly communicated” is now prepared to bring the PNAS editorial board before the NAS advocacy committee over the case, if necessary.

I was curious how journal reviewers are paid and so I called PNAS managing editor Daniel Salsbury the other day to ask him. Salsbury told me that neither the editorial board nor any of the anonymous reviewers of PNAS – the most prestigious science journal in the world – is paid. It’s “all voluntary”, said Salsbury.

What then is the incentive? Why do these extremely busy scientists work as slaves?

Wiley Evolution and Development journal editor Rudy Raff told me scientists see it as “traditional community service.” Raff says each of his editors gets an allowance for an editorial assistant but the editor does not get paid nor do the anonymous referees. And Raff thinks the anonymity does work. “It allows reviewers to speak frankly”, he said, “many scientists feel if someone is paid, there may be a question of bias.”

Massimo Pigliucci, an editor of the fairly new open-access journal Philosophy and Theory in Biology – whose board members include half a dozen of the Altenberg 16 scientists (esteemed cell biologist Stuart Newman is not among them) – once termed the idea of a paid review “bribery”.

But could such journal board positions simply be fast-tracks to publication of an editor’s or an editorial board member’s own work and a tool for access to grant money?

Raff indeed told me that “marks you look for in a scientist” are whether they have served on boards. But not too many, he said. As in the corporate world, that would be a negative indicator.

James MacAllister, a 61-year old graduate student in the Margulis lab at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, went further. MacAllister said “there’s certain politics and gaming of the system that goes on at the journals”.

MacAllister thinks editors and editorial reviewers are partial to publishing not only their colleagues but scientists whose papers cite familiar names — including those of the editors and editorial reviewers. Greater visibility of a scientist’s work leads to notice by potential funders.

Open-access scientific publishing, however, is proving useful to a degree in leveling the playing field so that independent scientists have a shot at being published and cited. But independent scientists still face the problem of editors not having the cross-disciplinary knowledge necessary to properly assess unique papers, i.e., the biologists may not know enough physics, for example.

Gregory O’Kelly, an independent investigator of electrochemical therapy in treating debilitation following nervous injury and reversing the degeneration of aging, submitted one of his papers titled “The terrestrial evolution of metabolism and life – by the numbers” to the open-access journal Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling. After facing numerous journal rejections, his paper finally drew the attention of TBioMed editor Paul Agutter and the paper was published, resulting in 1,400 viewers.

But when O’Kelly attempted to publish a second paper on the subject in TBioMed that was more cross-disciplinary involving serious math, the philosophy of science and the history of electrophysiology – the journal told him it was difficult to find reviewers for the paper. So O’Kelly approached other journals.

O’Kelly wrote to me following my story about Margulis and PNAS saying:

“I have submitted the paper to a number of philosophy of science journals, none of which, yet, would accept it for review. The list includes three journals, but is not limited to that. These three are Biology and Philosophy, University of Chicago Journal of the Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy and Theory in Biology. The paper has numerous references to papers published already in the first two journals. The paper’s content reveals that the authors of the referenced papers do not understand physics, nor do they understand the details and historical background of the original work that they now celebrate as biophysics. The editorial screens for these journals took up to a week to send me a rejection notice, on rather flimsy grounds. They are dedicated, it seems, to the perpetuation of the stasis of careerism that lies like a shroud on the field of academic publishing.

But the most insulting rejection came from Philosophy and Theory in Biology, a relatively new publication (started in August) whose senior editor is none other than Massimo Pigliucci. It took his team of editors only 36 hours to reject the paper on the grounds that it was not appropriate. The science and math in the paper, unless examined by specialists in the field, could not possibly have been understood by the editors in that amount of time. . . . I don’t think Massimo ever saw the paper, trusting instead to his editorial scriveners to do their duty. In an embarrassing rant, presented in two emails, I raged that not only was his journal the most appropriate one, given its stated objectives, but also his editorial linemen were stultifying in their ignorance not just of current trends in the biosciences, but of the philosophy of science and the physical sciences. . . . [D]espite his posturing as a man of science and a skeptic, [he] is an obstacle to scientific progress although chief editor of a journal alleged to advance that very thing.”

Floyd Rudmin, a psychology professor at the University of Tromso in Arctic Norway and member of the US organization, Psychologists for Social Responsibility also emailed me following the Margulis – PNAS story telling me about the obstacles to publishing his paper on how minorities adjust to a new culture – “acculturation”. Rudmin says there’s been a paradigm running since the 1960s on this that “violates all of the standards of psychological research”.

Rudmin says his paper addressing acculturation eventually won an American Psychological Association research prize and his department’s annual reseach prize, but that the paper could not pass peer review. He published it in an anthropology journal.

The paper is linked near the top on Google, he said, which pleases him (although many take issue with the fairness of the search engines, including this journalist. Also see John Landon’s book: World History and the Eonic Effect regarding search engine interference.).

Wrote Rudmin:

“One journal, Applied Psychology: An International Review, took one year to get 2 reviews (not the stipulated 3 reviews in 3 months), done by the very scholars [who] I told the editor in advance will oppose because I am exposing their own errors. My complaints to Blackwell’s CEO about this instigated Blackwell to create some editorial guidelines. But Blackwell said that they cannot intervene in any way in editorial decisions about content.

The problem is ubiquitous, and there is no avenue of appeal. Norway made a science ethics board, but they refuse to consider matters of unethical publication practices. Blackwell’s CEO told me that my only avenue of appeal is to the officers of the science associations who chose the journal editor. Scan. J. Psychol. is jointly run by the national psychology association of the 5 Nordic nations. I wrote to the officers of all 5 of them concerning this, and not one person replied.”

Also emailing in response to the Margulis piece was Morad Abou-Sabe, former President & Assistant Chancellor, Misr University for Science & Technology, Cairo and Emeritus Professor, Department of Cell Biology & Neuroscience, Rutgers:

“I guess I am not surprised about the review process, it has always been a privileged club that controlled both ends of the research process, grant funding and publications. I remember that at times I had to go to my congressman for help, but it did not matter. It is the “Old Boys Network”, as it is called.”

Constructal Theorist Adrian Bejan of Duke University says essentially what the individual investigator is up against is the “academic mafia” and notes the following in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics:

“Loaded with bias is the review process reserved for the big projects. The review is run by the “leaders,” the persons who head (or have headed) the big projects. They are the influential, the ones who are consulted during the review process and even before a new research initiative is selected for funding by the government. They are many, not one. They constitute a social stratum known colloquially as academic mafias and dark networks (in social dynamics, these terms mean “networks of persons exerting hidden influence”). Favored are the applicants who work for the mafia.”

Isn’t it time to stop kissing the ring?

Suzan Mazur is the author of Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Her interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her team of the 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints at Laetoli. Suzan Mazur’s reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

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“Grants are awarded by your colleagues who sit in Research Councils and Foundations. Most of us, in any establishment, tend to be conservative and to follow what is called the paradigm. This creates a cycle of submission. . . . The disregard for science’s …

“Grants are awarded by your colleagues who sit in Research Councils and Foundations. Most of us, in any establishment, tend to be conservative and to follow what is called the paradigm. This creates a cycle of submission. . . . The disregard for science’s ethical principles is widespread.” – Antonio Lima-de-Faria, Professor of Molecular Cytogenetics, Emeritus, Lund University

Does a science peer review system based on secret submission policies benefit the American public who fund science? A review by this author of correspondence between the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America – the print weekly and online daily research journal (paid subscription) of the National Academy of Sciences – and the authors of several recent scientific papers, most eventually published by PNAS, reveals a nasty back story about submission procedures that in some cases work against the best interests of the public as well as sound science.

The uproar had to do with three papers submitted to PNAS several months ago by NAS member Lynn Margulis, a recipient of the US Presidential Medal for Science. One of them, “Destruction of spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi round-body propagules (RBs) by the antibiotic Tigecycline“, the authors say involves an excellent candidate antibiotic for possible cure of the tick-borne chronic spirochete infection Lyme Disease in the US, recognized as “erythema migrans” in Europe and elsewhere. However, the paper was held up because PNAS said it had issues about the way Margulis chose her reviewers on the first (unrelated) paper she presented, that is, Donald Williamson’s “Caterpillars evolved from onychophorans by hybridogenesis”. As a result, all three papers were stuck. The last of the three, also on spirochetes, which Margulis says was properly and favorably reviewed, has not yet been approved for publication as this story goes to press.

Margulis is one of 2,100 US members of the NAS. She does not receive government funding and has further distinguished herself by refusing to take DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) money. Margulis admits she is viewed by some within the NAS as “contentious” but says she “only wants to see that real science, open to those who want to participate, is well done, discussed critically without secrecy and properly communicated”.

NAS promotes itself as a private, non-profit organization of distinguished scientists that serves the “general welfare”, although it was actually incorporated in1863 by Congress during the Lincoln presidency with a mandate to further the investigation of and report on science and art whenever called upon by any department of government. And in 1884, it was authorized “to receive and hold trust funds for the promotion of science, and for other purposes” (emphasis added). NAS is joined at the hip to the National Research Council, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine – collectively called, the National Academies.

When a reporter for Times Higher Education in London asked PNAS why the Margulis-introduced papers were on hold, she was told: “The submission process is confidential and we cannot comment on any papers currently under consideration.” In reality, a paper on advice to the editor by anonymous expert reviewers can be pulled at any point on its way to PNAS publication.

One of the reviewers Margulis selected for the Williamson paper reported receiving an intimidating call from an editor at Nature magazine and commented, “It sounded like he was trying to discredit the work and that I might have been a weak link.”

Margulis then learned that one of these anonymous expert PNAS reviewers was blocking publication of the Williamson paper, although she suspected that this was just the tip of the iceberg. She wrote me to say that she was always surprised that they ever had let her into NAS (elected in 1983). She wondered what the qualifications of the anonymous reviewer were and noted that the delay “was cruel . . . when so many people are suffering Lyme arthritis and this Brorson microbiology paper (that I actually co-author) provides a fine clue to eventual adequate treatment . . .”

Margulis who had just returned to her teaching position and lab at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst from Oxford University, where she’d spent the 2008-2009 academic year as Eastman Professor, then advised PNAS managing editor Daniel Salsbury of her course of action:

“. . . If [PNAS editor-in-chief] Randy Schekman or you or anyone else at the PNAS continues to pit Williamson’s, Robert Higgins’s, Professor Mark McMenamin’s, Oxford Professor Martin Brasier’s and my authority about marine larval evolutionary history against an anonymous expert reviewer and refuses to be satisfied with my reviewing procedure and therefore to block the entirely unrelated Brorson et al. paper, I am going to be forced to request a signed legal statement that Randy Schekman, you and the anonymous outraged reviewer in fact have more authoritative knowledge than we do about these evolutionary lineages. I humbly request that you do not force me into this position as I am not a litigious person. . . . The PNAS arguments are from authority and procedure and not from science. . . . I insist that Dr. Schekman speak to me directly about the quality of the science, that, in the end, you are trying to protect” . . .

While Margulis won the PNAS battle on both the Williamson and Lyme Disease papers, and one outraged critic came to light in a PNAS-published letter — Harvard University’s Gonzalo Giribet — questions remain about just what kind of science is promulgated at PNAS. (Giribet told me by phone he was not a “reviewer” on the original Williamson paper but also that he would never admit to being an “anonymous reviewer” if he were an anonymous reviewer.)

Another NAS member (foreign) has been in the process of suing PNAS for the same sort of last-minute expert board member rejection over a paper of his on nitrite in the water supply and cancer victims in China

Harvard scientist Richard Lewontin, considered by many to be the “most important evolutionary biologist of the passing generation,” resigned from NAS, describing the Academy as a “political organization which is almost quasi-governmental” and “not about to refuse the DOD and military establishment” (2003 interview with Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley). Lewontin left NAS because its operating arm, the National Research Council – funded by federal agencies – had committees that were doing secret war research.

We have no way of knowing if anything has changed regarding secret war research. In 2008, US government agency grants and contracts to the National Academies totaled $192.3 million with unspecified funding from private and nonfederal sources at $52.7 million. Some of those federal grants and contracts came from myriad branches of the Defense Department, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Security Agency and the Executive Office of the President (George W. Bush).

Suzan Mazur is the author of Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Her interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her team of the 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints at Laetoli. Suzan Mazur’s reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

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Among the high profile clients of British antiquities dealer Robin Symes was Maurice Tempelsman — one of the pillars of the Eastern Establishment (Council on Foreign Relations, Africa-America Institute, long-time beau of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis …

“The collection represents a selection of objects from a larger collection formed by Maurice Tempelsman, a diamond merchant resident in New York, over the past twenty-five years. The individual pieces come from a variety of sources, although the largest number were provided directly by, or were bought legally through, Robin Symes of London. All have been legally imported into the U.S. The collection is currently in the Museum.” – Acquisition Notes of Getty Museum antiquities curator Arthur Houghton cited in The Medici Conspiracy.

Among the high profile clients of British antiquities dealer Robin Symes was Maurice Tempelsman — one of the pillars of the Eastern Establishment (Council on Foreign Relations, Africa-America Institute, long-time beau of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and “friend” of former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright); Leon Levy & Shelby White and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were customers too. Symes bought his pieces primarily from now-convicted antiquities smuggler Giacomo Medici, the man who sold the Euphronios Sarpedon vases to Bob Hecht.

In a reversal of fortune beginning with the accidental death of Symes’s long-time business partner and companion Christo Michaelides ten years ago at a dinner party in Italy hosted by Levy & White and then many months in prison in the UK — Symes, once the prince of the ancient art trade, is now bankrupt. And Italy is asking for restitution of some 1,000 artifacts from Symes’s Trustees in Bankruptcy, according to Maurizio Fiorilli, the lawyer for Italy’s Ministry of Culture who negotiated the return of the Euphronios krater and other treasures from America’s museums.

Although Symes destroyed most of the documents related to his business partnership with Michaelides, there is still an indelible photo trail. Here is a sampling of the pieces Italy seeks as part of its cultural patrimony. In many cases there is an exact match of objects in the Medici polaroids seized during police raids on Medici in Geneva and of objects in the Symes hoard photographed by the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Related Articles:
• “Madeleine Albright & Maurice Tempelsman Q&A”
• “Mr. Garsin from Kinshasa”
• “Deeper Into The Dillon-Euphronios Nexus”
• Maurizio Fiorilli – Italy’s Antiquities Prosecutor
• Related Link >> Harvard Law School, Art Law 2008 Syllabus

Images Courtesy of Davide Proietti/Carabinieri Art Squad

ENDS

Suzan Mazur’s stories on art and antiquities have been published in The Economist, Financial Times, Connoisseur, Archaeology (cover) and Newsday. Other reports have appeared on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

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Vincent Fleury is a French scientist investigating origin of form with experiments involving cellular flow. He was recently featured in a PZ Myers Pharyngula blog — where his work first caught my eye.

Vincent Fleury is a French scientist investigating origin of form with experiments involving cellular flow. He was recently featured in a PZ Myers Pharyngula blog — where his work first caught my eye.

Born in 1963, Vincent Fleury lived for eight years in Uruguay before returning to France with his family. He completed a PhD at the Ecole Polytechnique in pattern formation in electrochemical growth and then began to focus on biological systems, studying the development of blood vessels and the lungs. Fleury says he’s long advocated the role of physical forces in development, apparent in blood vessels and in the lungs.

Fleury has proposed a biomechanical model of tetrapod formation by extending the concepts of cellular flow to the formation of the embryo as a whole. He says that “once the formation of the body of a tetrapod is boiled down to a simple physical field, different animals appear as different instances of a similar process, thus explaining obvious tendencies in evolution, and maybe the very origin of these animals.”

Vincent Fleury is the author of four popular science books: Arbres de pierres, Des pieds et des mains, De l’oeuf a l’eternite, La chose humaine, and under a pseudonym, six detective novels (four for adults and two for children).

My recent phone conversation with Vincent Fleury follows:

Suzan Mazur: Would you say there’s more than a language barrier when it comes to French and American thinking about evolution?

Vincent Fleury: That is a complex question. Yes. There is more than a language barrier regarding evolutionary science. American and British, i.e., Anglo-Saxon thinking is in terms of efficiency. The way Americans work, everything should work, everything is extremely pragmatic. Everybody on the team has a little bit of a job to do.

The consequence of that thinking is that Darwinism fits in very well. The animal works. It does the job it has to do. And it survives.

In general terms, French people are more Cartesian. We have a more philosophical way of thinking. We try to find deep concepts.

Suzan Mazur: What would you say the significance is of recent discussions at the Sorbonne on evolutionary mechanisms and of the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck conference in Israel?

Vincent Fleury: I was invited to such a conference at Versailles about two years ago.

Maybe there’s some kind of nervous breakdown among scientists, especially with a significant number of biologists who are exhausted and truly don’t understand what they are doing. Some of them wonder whether it’s science at all. They keep piling up facts about genes and chemicals but don’t have a satisfactory scheme.

Suzan Mazur: PZ Myers, the Howard Stern of sciencebloggers, recently reviewed your paper Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, a physicist’s point of view, which was published in The European Physical Journal: Applied Physics. It appears Myers is increasingly doing a pas de deux with the physical approach to evolutionary science, trying to reposition himself now that a paradigm shift is afoot. In essence, so he can maybe say, well I knew it all the time.

Last week he praised D’Arcy Thompson and Brian Goodwin, saying he found Goodwin’s work “thought-provoking”. What is your response to Myers tactics?

Vincent Fleury: I have mixed feelings. On the one hand he’s trying to promote good science and bring back people who are lost in creationism. The problem is…

Suzan Mazur: Do you agree he’s trying to reposition himself?

Vincent Fleury: Well that’s fine. But I have a problem with this fellow. He uses a very rhetorical technique. He starts off with some smooth positive statement and then progressively trashes the paper. I’m not so sure it s sincere.

Suzan Mazur: It’s his way of saying I love you. He knows he can’t maintain his present ground, so he’s increasingly introducing the newer evolutionary science, however he can. He projects himself as a bully so he won’t look like a sissy when he has no choice but to go with the flow.

Vincent Fleury: There are several issues. First of all, it’s the style of the man. When you read his blog, you read things like I’m a professor and if I had a student, I would have asked him to rewrite the paper in this and that way. Who is this man?

Suzan Mazur: Think Animal House and pimply adolescence. His audience, incidentally, includes some prominent evolutionary scientists — one of whom commented on your paper in the Pharyngula blog.

Vincent Fleury: Myers’ blog is constructed in a certain way. He writes reviews that are not that bad but then he opens it up to his hounds, half of whom are mad. Crazed! They finish the job.

Freedom of speech is one thing, but it is extremely insane to open the microphone to crazy people.

Suzan Mazur: Why was your paper sent to Pharyngula?

Vincent Fleury: Someone else sent the paper in to harass me. Myers says implicitly that he despises all these self-organization ideas, but if you look at his blog, his web site is a an example of self-organization.

Suzan Mazur: How have your colleagues at CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) responded to his attack?

Vincent Fleury: Who cares? The few who know of him in France understand it’s rubbish.

Suzan Mazur: You’ve commented that PZ Myers doesn’t know how the human body is established.

Vincent Fleury: Well that’s true. He doesn’t.

It’s been known for almost 100 years that the initial spherical oocyte becomes a spherical blastula. When it starts to resemble an animal, that happens by the third day in a chicken, it’s by a vortex motion. It’s a pattern of eddies. Little swirling movements.

You have vortices, like wind turning around, that transform the spherical thing into an elongated thing with two bumps in the hip region and two bumps in the shoulder region. So these are vortices.

Suzan Mazur: You’ve said it is a hyperbolic flow that transforms a round blastula into an embryo.

Vincent Fleury: How do animals acquire their form? You have a reference for it, the sphere. Oocytes are more or less spherical.

A couple of days after, you have an animal which is roughly recognizable. In the third day of the development of a chicken you already recognize the typical shape. It’s very rapid. It lasts about 15 hours. That specific movement transforms a sphere into something resembling an animal.

What is that? It’s a vortex flow. It’s composed of four vortices revolving around a stagnation point. And that’s a hyperbolic flow.

Suzan Mazur: What about the criticism that this may be too simple an approach.

Vincent Fleury: It’s not too simple. The problem is that for a century or so these vortices have escaped the attention of biologists. It’s not something that you can address with the biology techniques and concepts. However, today we can watch this with time-lapse microscopy, etc. People have recorded these vortices. There are actual movies of this.

I first made the theory about this. It had never been done before. It contains a lot of physics.

Suzan Mazur: So the hyperbolic flow can in essence be the origin of all form.

Vincent Fleury: Yes it’s the archetype. In Darwin’s book, chapter 13, there is a description of archetypes. He states there are four archetypes of animals. One of the archetypes is the tetrapods. He says that for whatever purpose they have limbs, etc. and that I don t know what the origin of the first archetype is, but afterwards all the animals may be obtained simply from the same archetype by stretching or flattening. That’s explicitly stated in Darwin’s book.

Suzan Mazur: And does the torus concept have any bearing on this?

Vincent Fleury: Maybe there is some torus inside the oocyte or in the first cell before the first cleavage that could be at the root of the phenomenon I don t know. What I do know is that if you take the first two cleavages when it’s basically crossed inside the first four blastomeres and you extrapolate the blastula and then you start the flow, it starts to move. With that initial big cross inside, you make a tetrapod. It’s completely automatic. It’s the attractor of the flow. It takes just a few hours.

Next, the only thing you can do is stretch the animal in six directions. The head, the tail and the limbs. All animals are obtained from the basic form by stretching the limbs, the neck or the tail.

Suzan Mazur: You talk about the deformation rate field. Can you explain what that is?

Vincent Fleury: When you start with a certain form, say spherical – 10 hours later you have a little fish. You have to deform the thing during a certain time. And this is what is called in physics a deformation rate, or strain rate. The deformation rate for an inflated balloon, for instance, is the speed of inflation.

Suzan Mazur: And you said you had the equation to deform an embryo to make a mouse and various other animals. To go from a lizard to a snake, from ape to human. Would you address that?

Vincent Fleury: When you deal with a physics problem, you try to have a simple mechanism that explains it all, so to speak, but that you can refine to any specifics. So when you look at the blastula you realize that it’s a hyperbolic flow. The hyperbolic flow has an extraordinary property. A major property. There is a point where the speed is zero in all directions. And this point represents the navel, the belly button.

So the very origin of our belly button is the fact that in the blastula, there is a zero point where the speed is zero in all directions. This is a fact. I’m not speaking of something hypothetical. You can observe it.

In mathematics when you have a point where the quantity that you are studying equals zero, then you can do a mathematical expansion of the problem around zero. And when you do that, you can show that with the hyperbolic flow — the first step is the hyperbolic flow — there is a contraction in the lateral direction and expansion in the head-tail direction. So the first tendency mathematically speaking of this flow is to transform a sphere into an elongated elipsoid. This is typically the transition of all animals which are more or less squarish.

In the direction of evolution you find more elongated animals. But it doesn’t mean there is a gene of elongation. There is no gene of elongation. It means that within the dynamics of the system, it is wired. Whatever gene you change, you make an animal which is more squarish or more elongated. It’s very simple. It’s one dimension. One degree of freedom around the belly button. This is why animals tend to be squarish around the belly button as is da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”, which bears the caption: “The true center of the human being is the navel.”

Or if you start to make more elongated animals, they will look like anguids or like snakes. In evolution, snakes result from a prolonged hyperbolic flow. It’s automatic. That ‘s the first order.

Now the second order is the twist of the tissue in each quadrant of the hyperbolic flow, which generates the position of the limbs. And depending on whether this twist is more or less twisted, you have an animal with a pelvis that is more or less warped and shoulders that are more or less warped. So you get an animal that is more like a kangaroo or more like a mouse.

Suzan Mazur: Your PhD is in physics pattern formation and crystal growth, is that correct?

Vincent Fleury: Electrochemical deposition and pattern formation.

Suzan Mazur: Would you explain how crystals come into the evolution picture? How do they come into the biology?

Vincent Fleury: It’s very well understood how a crystal grows. A lot of very beautiful mathematics have been developed over 250 years. A French man, Hauy, is the one who first invented crystallography and discovered that atoms were regularly ordered in crystals. At that time they were not sure that atoms existed, but Hauy understood that crystals were made of ordered elements.

The beautiful thing about crystals is that you see in the global shapes the property of the microscopic texture. You can recognize in the global shape the property of microscopic organization. That suggests two things. Forms appear by physics of moving boundaries and the fact that a small feature has an influence on the larger scale. And these two facts, I think, are really at the root of the development of the physics of evolution and of animal development right now.

Suzan Mazur: Antonio Lima-de-Faria, the University of Lund cytogeneticist, has been talking about things like this for many years as well. He says The biological and crystal levels are now found to have several common atomic parameters .

Vincent Fleury: In one of my papers regarding an equation for crystal growth I found a way of applying it to the growth of fruit and vegetables. You can show that lemons, for instance, or other fruit are some sort of crystals. They are not crystals of atoms, they are crystals of fibers.

Quartz, diamond, etc., their microscopic texture is made of organized atoms. The same physics with a slightly different input (fibers instead of atoms) gives you different shapes, and this is why biological shapes are not quite like crystal shapes but they share the same organizing principles.

Suzan Mazur: Here’s what Lima-de-Faria says: “The gene is only the bearer and the carrier, of the atomic order that already determined mineral symmetries. Moreover, due to the occurrence of molecular mimicry an organism may not even need to have the same genes to produce the same structural pattern.”

Vincent Fleury: Absolutely. That s a central point in my paper. In fact, the number of shapes which are produced by the physical laws are very limited. And in fact a huge quantity of genes will apply or project themselves on the same shapes.

If you look at dwarfism, there exists a hundred kinds of dwarfism associated with completely different genetic anomalies. But the consequence is the same thing. A condition, a morphology you call dwarfism. But it has a completely different origin. Because in fact you can change lots of genes, the consequence is basically the same. So in fact, it reduces considerably the number of outputs.

So for example, you can make an elongated animal from a squarish one in a completely different way. You have fish that are somewhat squarish and fish that are very elongated. It s the same mechanism for lizards becoming snakes. There is not a gene for an elongated animal.

Suzan Mazur: Scientists in America tend to be conservative about these subjects.

Vincent Fleury: In America you have big scientific teams with a lot of money, so the principal investigator has a heavy responsibility. In France and other countries in Europe we have less money and more individuals working in very small groups one or two people. So they do things which are newer or more original. They don t have the need to prove to their staff that what they are doing is safe.

Suzan Mazur: Here, to get funding from the government, scientists have to agree to ensure national security and the economic well-being of the country. You’re a French government scientist you don t have similar constraints?

Vincent Fleury: A few years ago we had more freedom. Now they’re looking more to the American model of efficiency. We fill out a file in which we more or less explain what will be the results of our experiments, ahead of doing them.

Suzan Mazur: The cost-effective approach.

Vincent Fleury: One last thing about PZ Myers. He made the following comment on his blog regarding my right of reply, instead of just publishing it: “I’m always happy to help a fellow hang himself.”

Even if he s trying to make a joke, we all know people who’ve committed suicide, and I would never entrust my children to a babysitter who states he is always happy to help someone hang himself.

Suzan Mazur is the author of Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Her interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her team of the 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints at Laetoli. Suzan Mazur’s reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

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Yes, there was a 1955 Lone Ranger episode called ” The Lost Chalice ” about a chase for escaped convicts and a treasure. And if you’re a Spaghetti Western fan, you might like the HarperCollins version of the book by the same name with its “Cast …

Hi Ho Silver! — The Lost Chalice

By Suzan Mazur

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Euphronios male figures – Sarpedon cup (520 BC) (left) and female figures(505 BC) (right)

Yes, there was a 1955 Lone Ranger episode called “The Lost Chalice” about a chase for escaped convicts and a treasure. And if you’re a Spaghetti Western fan, you might like the HarperCollins version of the book by the same name with its “Cast of Characters” by Bloomberg News Rome correspondent Vernon Silver. It’s about Silver’s quest to find the Euphronios Sarpedon cup, the “twin” of the Euphronios bowl the Metropolitan Museum of Art denied for 33 years (or so) came from Italy but returned to Italy in 2008. Sotheby’s sold the “twin” at auction June 19, 1990 for Texas oil man Bunker Hunt.

Hunt originally purchased the cup from Rodeo Drive dealer Bruce McNall, who got it from Roberto “Bully Bob” Hecht, who bought it from now-convicted dealer Giacomo Medici, who bought it back for $742,000 with a pedigree from Bunker Hunt via the 1990 Sotheby’s sale Silver calls the “auction of the century.”

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Suzan Mazur’s 1990 Economist magazine coverage of the Hunt-Sotheby’s auction

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A rose-colored spotlight is on the desperados in Vernon Silver’s tale of The Lost Chalice with the Italian lawyers and Carabinieri art squad in pursuit as Lone Ranger, Tonto and the posse.

However, the book gets off to a dusty start with the following astonishing claim about the kylix or cup in the prologue: “Its whereabouts are an art world mystery Until now.”

UNTIL NOW? Silver and I each reported in 2005 that the Sarpendon cup was in pieces in a box in the Villa Giulia museum after being dropped by the police during a raid on Medici’s warehouse. Moreover, my story referring to this was included in Harvard Law School’s 2008 curriculum along with 14 related articles of mine.

Here’s an excerpt from that December 6, 2005 story about the kylix being at Villa Giulia, with an email to me from former Met director Tom Hoving proposing that there was a second Sarpedon Euphronios cup. Hoving emailed both Silver and me on December 5, 2005, not just Silver. I didn’t act on Hoving’s tip because I didn’t believe it:

“Former Metropolitan Museum Director Tom Hoving has just emailed me saying he believes there were three depictions of Sarpedon by Euphronios and says former Met Greek and Roman curator Dietrich von Bothmer agrees. They cite the pieced together wine cup purchased at the Hunt-Sotheby’s auction by art dealer Giacomo Medici as one; it’s now in even tinier pieces in the Villa Giulia museum in Rome. Another cup Hecht presented by way of a photo to the Met in 1973. And, of course, the Met’s complete Euphronios vase. Hoving writes:

“Kiddo, I called the guy who was with me when bobbie h. [Hecht] showed the photo of the early sarpedon – dietrich von b [Bothmer]. I asked what he recalled seeing and he said exactly what I remembered, a Euphronios cup with Sleep and Death marching to the right with Sarpedon’s body on their shoulders like some log of wood. My eye doesn’t forget, it seems…”"

Also, I’ve interviewed Italy’s antiquities lawyer Maurizio Fiorilli, a tireless champion of his country’s cultural heritage. Silver lists Fiorilli last in his “Cast of Characters”, after all the diggers, dealers and acquisitors. But Fiorilli is for real, clearly not a canned-in-Hollywood character. He rightly went to the American media with his concerns and was successful. “Until now we have dreamed, we have slept. Now it is time to wake up,” he told the Los Angeles Times. He once shared his honest view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with me — “THIEVES!”

Here’s a glimpse of some of Silver’s other special effects — from his imaginary vision of me wide-eyed and holding the Euphronios cup on June 4, 1990 at the Hunt-Sotheby’s auction preview, a scenario he gives two pages in the book:

“The unexpected and rare treat unnerved the journalist. Her skin would touch the same surface Euphronios’s had, the same surface the Etruscans had handled and tomb robbers and smugglers had passed their fingers over. This cup had ruined Dietrich von Bothmer’s archaeology career and made its way from Robert Hecht to Bruce McNall to Bunker Hunt. . .”

I asked archaeologist and Met Ancient Near East scholar Oscar White Muscarella about von Bothmer’s “ruined” archaeology career. Muscarella’s courageous criticism of the acquisition of the Euphronios bowl by the Met gets several pages in the prologue of Peter Watson’s Medici Conspiracy book Muscarella gets an anonymous two-paragraph cameo in the Silver book. He emailed me saying this:

“You showed me Vernon Silver’s phrase: “This cup had ruined Dietrich von Bothmer’s archaeology career. . . .” because after presenting the slide of the cup at the 1972 year-end meeting of the AIA he lost the vote to be elected as one of its trustees. (I with others got him defeated.)

First, Bothmer had/has no “career in archaeology”—because he never was an archaeologist; and second, because everything he has ever done as a museum curator is contra archaeological responsibilities and spirit. And his aristocratic and billionaire background allowed him to successfully accomplish anything he wanted to do at the MMA, including ruining fellow employees.”

Vernon Silver credits me with inspiring his book-length quest for the chalice, saying he had “no idea” that the cup existed prior to my email to him about it. Lovely. So why was my request ignored when I asked — while the book was still in galleys — for a correction to copy that suggests I was courted by Sotheby’s “to build the hype and boost the sale” of the Hunt-Sotheby’s auction?

Nothing could be further from the truth. As an independent journalist I’d been addressing antiquities looting in a series of Economist articles – beginning in 1987 with a story about the Lydian Hoard.

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October 1987 letter from Economist Arts Editor John Parker to Suzan Mazur about the Lydian Hoard story

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And while the New York Times, the other news organization Silver cites reporting the auction, was indeed in the business of promoting the sale of ancient art – I was standing inside the auction ropes alongside Turkish journalist Ozgen Acar. Acar with Melik Kaylan wrote two pivotal antiquities exposes for Connoisseur magazine. I collaborated with Acar on another two stories for Connoisseur and spent part of the morning of June 19 with him at Bob Hecht’s New York gallery getting the “lowdown” from Hecht and his financier Jonathan Rosen about the Hunt-Sotheby’s sale, which Silver knows from reading my series syndicated by Scoop Media (2005-2008).

There is no mention of Ozgen Acar in Silver’s book, although Acar has for decades been one of the most incisive journalists covering the illicit art trade. If Silver had interviewed him, he might have been able to share with readers who the Turkish dealer was who sold the Sabina marble statue to Hecht from the “impressive haul” in his warehouse in Munich. The Sabina eventually wound up at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where Italy’s lawyer, Maurizio Fiorilli negotiated for its return to Rome in 2006.

Acar has emailed me from Turkey saying it’s likely it was Fuat Uzulmez of Munich’s Artemis Gallery. Uzulmez is the handsome playboy who escorted me out of the Hecht- McNall Park Lane Hotel auction in November 1990, putting his arm around me and whispering in my ear: “We are going to kill him [Acar].” Hecht’s daughter knew him as “Uncle Fuat”.

Silver argues that antiquities looting is systemic, citing the involvement of institutions such as the Met, Oxford University – where the antiquities trade did their thermoluminescence testing on objects – and Sotheby’s (he leaves out the IRS, which got the lion’s share of the $20 million from the Hunt antiquities sale and the US Justice Department, which enabled creditors to get their piece, and of course, the banks). But he appears sympathetic in his treatment of the most controversial figures.

Silver tells us that Medici was born into an antiquities looting way of life (like a polygamist being born into a polygamy family?) and says his family found hardship when Mussolini made all ancient artifacts found on Italian soil state property in 1939. He then presents Medici as a casualty of WWII Allied bombing. Later there is attention to Medici’s prostate surgery.

He similarly recounts the “grave danger” to von Bothmer’s life, his leaving Europe for New York (on the Queen Mary) in 1939 and enlisting as a private in the US Army only to get hit in both legs behind enemy lines fighting the Japanese in Dutch New Guinea. And Hecht serving his country as an interpreter during WWII. No mention of Hecht assaulting me and others.

To quote from my January 20, 2007 interview with Bob Hecht’s former Rodeo Drive partner Bruce McNall – who I also introduced Silver to by way of his home telephone phone number:

“When he [Hecht] was drinking he would get a little bit more testy and violent and upset about things. He never did anything to me per se. But when people would argue with him about something or he got upset, he definitely had a temper. It doesn’t surprise me that he took a punch at you.”

McNall told me this regarding Tom Hoving:

“The funny thing about Tom Hoving is he rants on about all these horrible things yet he knew everything – to my knowledge – from day one.”

And this regarding the origin of the Euphronios pieces:
“Suzan Mazur: Can you tell me what you know about the origin of the signed Euphronios vases Sotheby’s auctioned for the Hunts? You say in your book that “They [the Hunts] even bought their own pieces by Euphronios, a krater and a kylix. Both were obtained through Bob Hecht and bore the shadows that all of Hecht’s items carried.”

You said you sold the Sarpedon Euphronios cup to Bunker Hunt for about $1 million and that it was probably purchased from the same tombaroli who supplied Hecht’s Sarpedon Euphronios krater. Can you be more specific? Did Hecht ever tell you the real story behind the origin of the Sarpedon Euphronios krater?

Bruce McNall: Not really. It was the one area during the entire course of the partnership he would avoid. Having said that, I always felt that it came from Medici. That was my assumption.

Suzan Mazur: The Sarpedon krater and Sarpedon kylix.

Bruce McNall: Right. The krater and the kylix. . . .”

And, there’s a distortion of how the Hunt sale actually unfolded. Silver writes “But the Euphronios chalice was the pint-sized star of the auction.”

All eyes were not on the Euphronios pieces. Silver wasn’t at the Hunt sale and did not interview a cross-section of those in attendance or, I gather, even read NYT reporter Rita Rief’s June 15, 1990 story. Rief put it like this:

“Among the most important offerings is one of the largest Roman bronze figures ever auctioned, a 45-inch standing youth from the second century B.C., expected to bring $800,000 to $1.2 million. Notable, too, are the two ancient Greek vessels by the vase painter Euphronios. . ”

Around the time of the auction I did interview Bunker Hunt, Boston Museum of Fine Arts classical curator Cornelius Vermeule, dealers Joel Malter, Andre Emmerich, Arnold Sasslow and others. Weeks before the sale I also spoke with Ed Merrin (who bought 10 pieces at the Hunt sale) for an Economist story and with his financier Asher Edelman (inspiration for Wall Street‘s Gordon Gekko).

The most expensive piece on the block was the Roman bronze boy, which had been exhibited by the Met, MFA, Kimball Art Museum and others. During our pre-auction interview Vermeule told me, “I’d estimate it goes for $1.5 to $2 million.” Vermeule’s favorite piece though was the Medea vase – “I’d kill for #14,” he said.

Hecht thought the Zeus head would go for $1 million.

Some were looking to the coins. The Athena coin was chosen as the visual for my Economist story, even though Arnold Sasslow advised:

“The one [Athena decadrachm] that sold for $480,000 is far inferior to the decadrachm hoard from Turkey which have sold for $250,000 [each].”

A point Hecht made at his gallery that morning.

The cover of the auction catalogue featured a drinking cup attributed to Epidromos with a naked hunter holding a spear and wearing a hat. That cup would resurface in October 2006 on Madison Avenue at the Aboutaam brothers’ sale (an event the New York Times was paid over $20,000 by the Aboutaams to advertise).

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Too much of Silver’s book simply recycles the old Euphronios stories of Tom Hoving (Silver has an entire chapter about the Euphronios bowl called The “Hot Pot”, referring to Hoving’s series by the same name), Nicholas Gage, John Hess, Bruce McNall, Peter Watson, Archaeology magazine and mine.

What is enlightening in Lost Chalice is the information Silver shares from his original reporting in June 2008 at the Euphronios krater dig site with “the last known surviving member of the tomb-robbing gang”. His presentation of the Sarpedon mythology, Euphronios painting technique (no mention of his innovation in depicting female nudes though) and Beazley method of recording vases is inspired.

Suzan Mazur’s stories on art and antiquities have been published in The Economist, Financial Times, Connoisseur, Archaeology (cover) and Newsday. Other reports have appeared on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

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The elevator was supposed to go down to the powder room but mysteriously went up to the 8th floor at Manhattan’s Rockefeller University, where I was attending a two-day public Evolution symposium last May. As the doors opened, in walked Nobel …

“I have an idealistic view of science as a liberalising and progressive force for humanity. . . . It is also a truly international activity which breaks down barriers between peoples of the world, an objective that always has been necessary and never more so than now.” – Paul Nurse, Le Prix Nobel

The elevator was supposed to go down to the powder room but mysteriously went up to the 8th floor at Manhattan’s Rockefeller University, where I was attending a two-day public Evolution symposium last May. As the doors opened, in walked Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and Rockefeller University president Paul Nurse. I had emailed him, coincidentally, about an interview, and told him so while riding back down with him to the main floor. He was engaging, if perhaps a bit startled by the encounter (I’m taller). Once outside the building he made a quick escape and was soon halfway up the walkway to the talks at the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome calling “Send me your stories!”

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We bumped into one another again that night at the Evolution cocktail party and spoke briefly about the Charlie Rose Show science roundtables he’d co-hosted. I recontacted him recently and he agreed to a phone interview.

I didn’t know a lot about the man Paul Nurse at the time of the Rockefeller event beyond the extraordinary charm he exudes on television and his public honors and accomplishments. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1999 for his excellent cancer research, awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001 for discovering key regulators of the cell cycle, given the French Legion d’ Honneur in 2002, and named president of Rockefeller University in 2003. He’s also a fellow of the Royal Society, a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences and foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I was happy to discover that he is self-made. Nurse grew up in the English countryside. His mother was a cook and part-time cleaner, his father a chauffeur and handyman and later a mechanic for Heinz.

Nurse writes in his autobiography that he fell in love with nature on long walks to school and became a biologist because of this. He says he had a difficult time in secondary school memorizing and didn’t test well. But he was so talented in science that the University of Birmingham eventually waived his French language admission requirement, for instance. Until it did, he worked for a lab associated with Guinness brewery.

Paul Nurse received his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Birmingham and his PhD in molecular biology from the University of East Anglia. He was a professor of microbiology at Oxford for many years and also served as Director General, Imperial Cancer Research Center. His current research at Rockefeller University involves “the molecular machinery that drives cell division and controls cell shape”.

But he says he is “a complete amateur” when it comes to things like complexity and evolution.

Our interview follows.

Suzan Mazur: I’d like to pick up on the point you made at the World Science Festival in response to Stanford University physicist and string theorist Leonard Susskind saying there are elements of biology and evolution in physics, and that in 1905 physics “moved out of the domain of ordinary experience . . . into the domain of high velocity.”

To which you said:

“Maybe biology is on the edge of something similar to 1905 physics with the emerging complexity of biological systems – in fact, a move from straight forward linear causality. And I do wonder whether biology may go through a revolution in the coming decades.”

Can you expand on that?

Paul Nurse: Well I can expand a little bit, not enormously, as follows.

What I think I’m thinking about is that biology deals with complexity, with networks that are linked together in very complicated ways with all sorts of feedback, positive and negative. All sorts of redundancies, that is, if one part of the network fails, there are other ways of compensating for it.

Furthermore, networks that can change, unlike normal computer hardware. So you could rewire the networks in different ways in space and time. In cells and organisms. And as a consequence of this, a very complex set of behaviors can emerge.

They could be on the edge of chaos, which has been discussed a lot by others. They are difficult to predict intuitively.

Suzan Mazur: A number of biologists knowledgeable in the physical sciences have proposed that multicellular form and pattern are as much a function of the physics of mesoscale materials as of the gene products that constitute those materials. This has been claimed to present a direct challenge to Darwinian scenarios for the origin of organismal body plans. I was wondering if you see this as a potential 1905 moment for biology.

Paul Nurse: I don’t agree with the challenge to “Darwinian scenarios”.

Darwin himself argued that although natural selection is a driving force for change, there are restraints on organisms and how and where they can evolve. And that restraint, as he argued in 1859, is really the equivalent of what you refer to.

Suzan Mazur: Are you saying that “restraint” that Darwin referred to is the equivalent of the evolutionary mechanisms these biologists are referring to?

Paul Nurse: What they, I think, are referring to is the fact that living things can’t occupy all of the phase-space. That is to say, there are certain limited stable states and conditions.

That’s one that’s been argued on and off for many years. I remember when I was a graduate student, for example, Brian Goodwin used to argue this. Darwin himself argued that there are restraints. Obviously, living things made of proteins and nucleic acids, denature at high temperature. These living organisms can’t live at very high temperatures. They have to live in watery environments at reasonable temperatures.

Those are the sort of restraints I think probably that Darwin was thinking of.

Suzan Mazur: Do you think the emerging complexity of biology might require a new mathematics or is it the reverse that the mathematics of straightforward linear causality is inappropriate in the first place and needs to be replaced by math for which the emergent complexity of life is an epiphenomenon of more fundamental physical processes that these mathematics model?

Paul Nurse: It may require a new mathematics. Because I’m not a mathematician I’m not quite sure what that might generate/ do.

It may require a different sort of language, by which I mean, quite often what biologists do is make interaction maps. Does A touch B touch C touch D and so on.

But, in fact, the nature of those interactions varies. Sometimes they just touch and do nothing. Sometimes they touch and turn into something else. Sometimes they touch and change another connection.

Using simple network analogies, like transport networks for example – it’s not appropriate because it’s not reflecting the biology. It’s reflecting a man-made simplified interaction network. So we may need different language which could lead to different mathematics to describe this – and that this is not going to be intuitive, to go back to my earlier point.

We perhaps have to think, I’ve sometimes argued this, of better ways to move from the chemistry of life, which we’re rather good at describing, into how that chemistry is translated into the management of information.

There are very good examples of that. DNA is a chemical that has a structure that can be translated into a digital information storage device. And we understand its role in biology in terms of a digital information device.

What we think about is the storage of information and how it’s translated. I think we may need to think of better ways of translating the chemistry, which is what most of us do, into the management of information.

Suzan Mazur: This is a bit off the point, but I was just watching a 1986 television interview with Isaac Asimov, where he said “I have no hesitation in invading fields.” He said he knew nothing about astronomy, for instance, before he started writing his books. That he was self-educated in astronomy. He thought there was no harm in generalists in science and that the danger was too much specialization.

I wondered if you had any thoughts about that. The fact that you’re presenting speakers at the World Science Festival to a public audience and on the Charlie Rose Show. You must think that it’s important that the wider audience be brought into the thinking and discussion of science and evolution.

Paul Nurse: I think it’s very important for science and scientists to be talking to the general public.

Suzan Mazur: And on the evolution issue, particularly?

Paul Nurse: For example, evolution. But actually on many topics, simply because we receive enormous support from the public and the public has to think that there is something there that’s worth supporting, which is, improving the health, wealth creation and better quality of life, etc.

But it’s probably a different point you’re making, which is a more generalist one I guess.

Suzan Mazur: Well there are some ideas out there in the public that could be useful.

Paul Nurse: I don’t know. When we say the public, I certainly think that there are ideas out there which touch lots of different disciplines. So I think having interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary approaches could be interesting. Whether they will come from the public, I’m not sure.

Suzan Mazur: That’s what’s happening now because of the Internet.

Paul Nurse: It is but there’s so much garbage on the Internet. And everybody wants to have a grand idea.

Like you were saying, people say, oh they’ve proven Darwin wrong. I mean this is just publicity really. It isn’t real sort of argument.

Suzan Mazur: So you’re saying Darwin has already said this.

Paul Nurse: In that case yes, but it’s all become too much of a totem. Of course, how could Darwin get everything right in 1859? I mean it’s just ridiculous. It’s just one of these really stupid arguments.

Suzan Mazur: New language to say the same thing?

Paul Nurse: Well the new language part was really just to try and deal with the complexity of nature. And I’m saying nothing new. People have talked and discussed about this for ages.

Kant was the first person I came across talking about systems, etc. over 200 years ago. But more recently since the Second World War, in the 1940s and 1950s information theory, game theory, Shanon, Weinberg, et al. – these characters thought a lot about information, and how it’s managed.

This was overshadowed by the molecular biology revolution, which has a very powerful way of understanding things. It didn’t focus on complexity and indeed could not encompass that complexity. And now I see what’s very interesting is that we can use the rigor and tools of molecular biology and molecular genetics, combined with a better understanding of complexity.

That’s much more fertile ground for these discussions than we’ve had for 30, 40 years.

Suzan Mazur: Your own work on evolution at present is on what?

Paul Nurse: Everything I’m talking about here, both in evolution or in terms of complexity is not my research area – I’m a complete amateur.

Suzan Mazur: What panel are you presenting at the World Science Festival this year?

Paul Nurse: They’ve just written to me about this. I think I’m doing something on storytelling.

Suzan Mazur is the author of Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Her interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her team of the 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints at Laetoli. Suzan Mazur’s reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

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This is one of the most refreshing examples I’ve seen of how Internet reporting is influencing institutional learning. Unbeknownst to me, at the time that Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution? was beginning to “reverberate throughout the evolutionary …

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This is one of the most refreshing examples I’ve seen of how Internet reporting is influencing institutional learning. Unbeknownst to me, at the time that Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution? was beginning to “reverberate throughout the evolutionary biology community”– as Science magazine later reported — 15 of my stories on the Rome antiquities trial (still underway) involving Giacomo Medici, Bob Hecht and Marion True were included in the curriculum at Harvard Law School, along with a link to one of Karl Meyer’s World Policy Journal articles about disputed art, one by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Review of Books and a few others.

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Harvard Law School, Art Law 2008 Syllabus

When I discovered the 2008 syllabus, I phoned Harry S. Martin III, who is now Harvard Law School’s Henry N. Ess III Librarian and Professor of Law, Emeritus. Harry (“Terry”) Martin has served at Harvard Law for 27 years and is currently Visiting Professor of Law and Interim Director, Tarlton Law Library and Jamail Center for Legal Research at the University of Texas School of Law. He is also chair of the advisory board for the May 2009 China-US Conference on Legal Information and Law Libraries.

Harry S. Martin III

Martin told me that aside from the quality of the reporting and the visuals, he found my stories “irreverent” and knew they’d appeal to his students. He said he would have included more of them in the curriculum but couldn’t find them all (there were 30).

Some of my Euphronios story coverage, including bits from Sotheby’s Pre-Auction Transcript, is also included in Vernon Silver’s forthcoming book (June 2009, HarperCollins) about the Rome antiquities trial and Euphronios wine cup — The Lost Chalice. Vernon Silver is a Bloomberg news reporter based in Rome.

For the record, there was no courtship of me in June 1990 by Sotheby’s, contrary to what Silver writes. I approached Sotheby’s as an independent journalist writing a piece about Bunker and Herbert Hunts’ hoard on the auction block for The Economist magazine; the piece was commissioned by the marvelous Ann Wroe, then arts editor. It was part of an art looting series I did for The Economist which included a feature on Turkey’s Lydian Hoard, one from Bogota on spectacular pre-Columbian gold (meaning fertility to the pre-Columbians) and another on the interaction between museums and the venture capitalists of Wall Street.

As reporters sometimes do exchange notes, in November 2005, I asked Silver if he knew the whereabouts of the Euphronios wine cup which had been sold at the Hunt-Sotheby’s auction — noting that it had the same theme of Sarpedon, son of Zeus as the Euphronios bowl then “owned” by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I also posed that question on this page in the Nov. 4, 2005 story Euphronios Ancient Art In Court.

Silver emailed me saying he didn’t know a Euphronios Sarpendon cup even existed but our exchange sparked his interest. He later developed a rapport with Giacomo Medici and learned that Medici “owned” the cup, and that it was in pieces following a raid on Medici’s warehouse by the Italian and Swiss police. Silver secured a photo of the shattered cup and shared that image with me. I ran the photo on this page December 1, 2005 in Sotheby’s & The Signed Euphronios.

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In his book, Silver interviews former Met director Tom Hoving. Hoving was editor-in-chief of Connoisseur in the late 1980s when I met him to shake on a story I then co-authored for the magazine with Turkish investigative journalist Ozgen Acar. I later interviewed Tom Hoving for The Economist Hunt brothers story. Hoving said the following about the Euphronios pieces in response to my question about whether the wine cup could have come from the same site as the Met’s Euphronios bowl:

“People did not collect Euphronios in the fifth century BC; we are looking at this with a twentieth-century mind.”

And Hoving emailed both me and Silver about the existence of another Euphronios Sarpendon cup, which he said he and then-Met curator of Greek and Roman art Dietrich von Bothmer had seen in a photograph that Bob Hecht showed them in the 1970s. I didn’t find Hoving’s story credible and decided not to spin my wheels chasing a phantom chalice.

Here’s Hoving’s email to me, which appeared here in Bob Hecht, The Younger, December 2005.

“Kiddo, I called the guy who was with me when bobbie h. [Hecht] showed the photo of the early sarpedon—dietrich von b [Bothmer]. I asked what he recalled seeing and he said exactly what I remembered, a Euphronios cup with Sleep and Death marching to the right with Sarpedon’s body on their shoulders like some log of wood. My eye doesn’t forget, it seems. . . .”

I plan to review The Lost Chalice at greater length. But Vernon Silver, who, I believe began his book as part of an Oxford University PhD dissertation, nicely ties up the loose ends of the Euphronios mystery. And his attention to both the mythology and the technique that the Athenian artist used to create his masterpieces is enriching. Silver paints a surprising and sympathetic portrait of Giacomo Medici’s youth in Italy during WWII, somewhat reminiscent of the misery and desperation of the Anna Magnani films.

“I guess it first began with some cheap foreign coins our parents brought home from trips abroad”, says Bunker Hunt, talking of his interest in collecting; “That and a boyhood treasure of Indianhead pennies.” Back in the oil-boom days of the 1970s, before Colonel Qaddafi nationalised Bunker’s oilfield and the silver market collapsed, he and his brother Herbert amassed a quarter-ton of ancient coins and some astonishing pieces of ancient art. These were put up for sale in New York on June 19th to appease the Internal Revenue Service and the Hunts’ various creditors, and raised more than $20m. The Hunts have bargained for a 60% commission over the benchmark figure on total sales.

On the night, everyone of note was there; excitement among collectors, dealers and cognoscenti was “absolutely palpable”. The pieces included Bunker Hunt’s favourites, a signed wine cup and fragment of a vase by Euphronios, the master of Greek vase painting; Sotheby’s has never before handled a signed piece by an ancient artist. The cup went for $742,000, the vase-fragment (75% plastic) for $1.7m. A Roman bronze of a young man went for $539,000; an amphora portraying Athena with Pegasus on her shield, originally presented (filled with olive oil) as a prize at the Panathenaic games, fetched $190,000.

This was a landmark sale for ancient coins, establishing them as works of art. A silver Sicilian decadrachm of Agrigentum (410 BC), with a horse-drawn chariot in flight and two eagles devouring a hare on the reverse, fetched $572,000, a record for an ancient coin. A silver decadrachm of Athens honoring the patron goddess, who was shown in a crested helmet, went for $528,000. The Athenian coin is one of only two dozen to survive since they were struck in 465 BC, at the end of the Persian wars.

The chequered history of these artefacts is sometimes as interesting as the pieces themselves. Bunker Hunt got his decadrachm—and many of the other pieces in his collection—through Bruce McNall, the top coin man in Los Angeles and the owner of the LA Kings hockey team. In 1988 Mr McNall tried to sell at auction a number of coins, found in Emali, in Turkey, in 1984, which had been consigned to him by William Koch, an oil heir and a trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. During the auction the Turkish government appeared, claimed cultural patrimony and regained possession of the coins, which were said to have been smuggled out of the country by the Turkish mafia. Mr McNall’s consignment had included an Athenian decadrachm which, for some reason, had been withdrawn from sale; and six of the coins from the Emali hoard are still said to be missing. It is unclear how many are still held by Mr Koch, and Mr McNall has for some weeks been unavailable for comment.

Mystery also surrounds the Euphronios pieces. Thomas Hoving, when he was director of the Metropolitan Museum, was urged by the curator of Greek and Roman art, Dietrich von Bothmer, to buy the signed wine-cup for $70,000 from Robert Hecht, a department-store heir. Mr Hoving declined, because he had just paid $1m for a Euphronios bowl which the Italian government claimed had been looted from an Etruscan tomb. Mr Hecht said he had bought it from a Lebanese businessman whose father had acquired it in a trade for some coins; but he was arrested in both Italy and Turkey on charges of buying looted antiquities.

[Note: Hecht later confronted me about this story in the stairwell at an art exhibit, pulling back his arm in an attempt to punch me in the face -- I am advised this constitutes assault.]

Mr Hoving did not wish to burn his fingers again.

Could the wine-cup have been excavated from the same site as the Metropolitan’s bowl? Mr Hoving says it is impossible. “People did not collect Euphronios in the fifth century BC; we are looking at this with a twentieth-century mind.”

Mr von Bothmer, who has recently retired from the Met, said he first learnt of the existence of the cup “in Norway” in 1971, when it was said to be worth $15,000. “There is no source to a cup”, he was quoted as saying at the time; “a cup is a cup.” However, other art experts have said the Etruscans often included more than one costly piece in the tombs of prominent people; and Italy still contends that the cup is of questionable origin.

The Hunts also wound up with a number of the Met’s ancient coins, among them a Camarina tetradrachm with Heracles in a lionskin headress, and a coin commemorating the Roman Emperor Titus. These were deaccessioned and sold, a year after the acquisition of the Euphronios vase, “for important purchases, particularly Greek and Roman art objects”, as Mr Hoving said at the time of the sale. There is speculation that the coins were somehow part of the Euphronios trade.

At any rate, it is all out of Bunker and Herbert’s hands now. How do they feel about losing their treasured vignettes of classical history? “Not very good. It had to be done,” says Bunker Hunt sadly.

Suzan Mazur’s stories on art and antiquities have been published in The Economist, Financial Times, Connoisseur, Archaeology (cover) and Newsday. Other reports have appeared on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

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While Eastman Professor Lynn Margulis clearly doesn’t have time on her hands at Oxford University’s Balliol College where she’s spending the year away from her other job as Distinguished University Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst …

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“Lynn Margulis is an example of somebody who didn’t follow the rules and pissed a lot of people off. She had a way of looking at symbiosis which didn’t fit into the popular theories and structure. In the minds of many people, she went around the powers that be and took her theories directly to the public, which annoyed them all. It particularly annoyed them because she turned out to be right.” – W. Daniel Hillis, The Third Culture

While Eastman Professor Lynn Margulis clearly doesn’t have time on her hands at Oxford University’s Balliol College where she’s spending the year away from her other job as Distinguished University Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst – I did actually run out of tape talking with her in round one of our conversation, barely scratching the surface on symbiosis (“new species evolve primarily through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers”), the evolutionary concept that brought her the Presidential Medal of Science in 1999. Margulis says that as far as “survival of the fittest” goes, it’s a “capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin” and that even banks and sports teams have to cooperate to compete. She sees natural selection as “neither the source of heritable novelty nor the entire evolutionary process” and has pronounced neo-Darwinism “dead,” since there’s no adequate evidence in the literature that random mutations result in new species.

Margulis takes a holistic view of evolutionary science, and her U. Mass. lab page notes that their work “seamlessly” involves microbiology, cell biology, genetics, ecology, “soft rock” geology, astronomy, astrobiology, atmospheric sciences, metabolic organic and biochemistry.

This year on Darwin’s 200th birthday anniversary (Feb. 12), she was awarded the Darwin Wallace medal by the Linnean Society of London. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, served as chair of the NAS Space Science Board Committee on Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution, was elected to the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, the World Academy of Art and Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among other honors.

Lynn Margulis told me that when she wrote her book Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons she was entirely ignorant of the Russian work of Boris Mikhailovich Kozo-Polyansky (1924) and his predecessor’s concepts of symbiogenesis. She said she also knew little of the American antecedents (e.g., Ivan E. Wallin’s Symbionticism and the Origin of Species, 1927). Margulis said she simply had read with great interest Columbia Professor E.B. Wilson’s tome “The Cell in Heredity and Development” (1925). Yet her conclusions closely resembled those of Kozo-Polyansky and other unknown symbiogenesis-championing predecessors albeit with modern genetic, biochemical and paleontological information.

She has co-authored seven books with Dorion Sagan, her son from her first marriage (at 19) to the late astronomer Carl Sagan. Those books include: Symbiotic Planet: A new look at evolution; Acquiring Genomes: A theory of the origins of species; What is Sex?; What is Life?; Mystery Dance: On the evolution of human sexuality; Microcosmos: Four billion years of evolution from our microbial ancestors; Origins of Sex: Three billion years of genetic recombination. With M.J. Chapman, her close colleague and former student, she’s written Kingdoms & Domains: An illustrated guide to the phyla of life on Earth, now in its 4th edition.

She adores many of her colleagues, describing them as “marvelous!”, “wonderful!” “superb!”. And she advised that she would have “no time” to talk with me as soon as her daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren arrive for a visit.

Lynn Margulis spent 22 years teaching at Boston University prior to her current faculty positions. She has a BA from the University of Chicago, an MS in zoology and genetics from the University of Wisconsin and a PhD in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley.

But she didn’t start out this way. She was born on the south side of Chicago to a non-science family, had a wild streak and admits (most women won’t) that she loved to chase and be chased by guys. She married two of them.

Our recent phone conversation follows a slightly improved abstract of the paper she presented in Rome last week at the “Biological Evolution Fact and Theories” conference organized jointly by the Jesuits, Pontifical Gregorian University (Rome) and the University of Notre Dame (Indiana).

Origin Of Evolutionary Novelty By Symbiogenesis

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Images Courtesy of Lynn Margulis

Whereas speciation by accumulation of “random DNA mutations” has never been adequately documented, a plethora of high-quality scientific studies has unequivocally shown symbiogenesis to be at the basis of the origin of species and more inclusive taxa.

Members of at least two prokaryotic domains (a sulfidogenic archaebacterium, a sulfide-oxidizing motile eubacterium) merged in the origin of the earliest nucleated organisms to evolve in the mid-Proterozoic Eon (c. 1200 million years ago).

Such a heterotrophic, phagocytotic motile protoctist was ancestral to all subsequent eukaryotes (e.g., other protoctists, animals, fungi and plants).

The defining seme of eukaryosis, the membrane-bounded nucleus as a component of the karyomastigont, evolved as Thermoplasma-like archaebacteria and Perfilievia-Spirochaeta-like eubacteria symbiogenetically formed the amitochondriate LECA (the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor). Their co-descendants (that still thrive in organic-rich anoxic habitats) are amenable to study so that our videos of them will be shown here.

There are no missing links in our scenario. Contemporary photosynthetic (green) animals (e.g., Elysia viridis, Convoluta roscoffensis), nitrogen-fixing fungi (Geosiphon pyriforme), cellulose digesting animals (cows, Mastotermes darwiniensis termites) and plants (Gunnera manicata) make us virtually certain that Boris Mikhailovich Kozo-Polyansky’s (1890-1957) analysis (Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, 1924) was and still is correct.

Symbiogenesis accounts for the origin of hereditary variation that is maintained and perpetuated by Charles Darwin’s natural selective limitations to reaching the omnipresent biotic potential characteristics of any species.

Suzan Mazur: What is the significance of the Rome evolution conference and why was it limited it to US-European papers?

Lynn Margulis: I didn’t know it had been. You mean no Chinese or Japanese?

Suzan Mazur: There are no Russian, Chinese, African, Indian or Japanese presenters listed.

Lynn Margulis: This is not a policy of limitation, this fact resulted from historical circumstances.

It must be deeply understood that the term “evolution,” which is not used by Charles Darwin – he called the process “descent with modification” – is Anglo-Saxon. It is very much a British-American “take” on the history of life, traditionally limited to Anglophones.

Most English-speaking scientists think in hushed hagiographic terms when they mention Charles Darwin, comparable to English thought about physics before Einstein when Newton was the only game in town. It’s a very English nationalist phenomenon, especially as Darwin was later interpreted.

Suzan Mazur: Do you think the Rome conference organizers had that in mind when they were inviting papers?

Lynn Margulis: No I don’t think so. It probably didn’t even occur to them that the guest list on their “international meeting” might strike some as racist!

The Chinese and the Navajos lack any tradition in evolution, although they both enjoy superb medicine (healing) traditional practice.

Professor Tom Glick, a former colleague of mine at Boston University — he’s wonderful — wrote a book, The Comparative Reception of Darwin, with chapters by country.

A joint student of ours suggested the study needed a chapter on the Chinese reception of Darwinism. The book has a chapter on Japan, Latin American coverage, Spain, many countries – on how Darwinism was perceived and received in the century between 1859 and about 1970.

This young man, a doctoral candidate in the history of science, went to China for a year and discovered no tradition of Darwinian evolution there. He ended up studying aspects of Chinese medicine.

Also, my colleague Tacheeni Scott, a fine cell biologist, a Navajo, told me that his culture has no concept whatsoever of evolution. They just have no tradition.

Suzan Mazur: But there is significant research on evolution taking place in India and Japan. I haven’t looked at African evolution studies but I did interview scientists in Africa in the 1980s for Omni magazine — they were trained by the Soviets, so there must be important African thinking about evolution.

Lynn Margulis: Most of Africa was colonized by Europe. Let’s put it this way. In the Russian equivalent of the Encyclopedia Britannica, some 250 pages describe symbiogenesis – in an evolutionary context of course. In Darwinian evolutionary books published in and before 1982 as part of the centenary activity of Darwin’s death in 1882, there is zero on symbiogenesis.

You have a point. Certain countries are expected to be excluded because they lack traditional study of evolution.

Suzan Mazur: The theme of the Rome Conference is “Biological Evolution Facts and Theories: A Critical Appraisal 150 Years After The Origin of Species”. Would you comment on how funding colors evolution fact and theory?

Lynn Margulis: I will give you a specific example. In perhaps about 1980, Harvard professor Richard Lewontin – you know him?

Suzan Mazur: Yes. I’ve interviewed him. .

Lynn Margulis: And the late Margaret Dayhoff. . . She was a protein biochemist who started the use of protein sequence information to reconstruct evolutionary history. She co-authored a marvelous series of books on Protein Sequence and Structure in the early 1970s with Richard Eck. Their handbook collected all the evolutionary information at the time, which wasn’t much. Dayhoff et al. realized that the kinds of data they were getting could only be comprehended in the light of evolution.

The late paleontologist and Harvard professor Elso Barghoorn was involved too. There were four or five of us who, by correspondence exclusively, realized that the major issue in all our research — whether it was electrophoresis or the microfossil record – was the evolution story. So we talked about ways of putting pressure on the National Science Foundation to set up an evolution section. This clearly was in NSF’s (not NIH’s) purview. Dayhoff was funded by a chemistry section of the National Institute of Health. Barghoorn was supported by a geology section of NSF and by NASA.

We wrote a carefully honed letter that said a very strong set of researchers existed who consider their primary activity “evolution” and yet their methods are very different. We proposed that our efforts be joined. This would lead to reduction of redundancy and save money for the funding agencies. It would probably further evolution science more than anything else to construct an evolution program. We investigators would not have to prevaricate about our interests. We said it politely.

I think I sent the letter in. I did not receive an answer from them for over a year, perhaps for two years. Then out of the blue, long after I figured there would never be an answer and had entirely forgotten, I received an answer from the NSF.

Remember Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson who ridiculed the NSF saying the NSF funded work on the left toe of spiders or something? He was just trying to be sensible. I can understand.

Anyway, I deduced that NSF scientist-bureaucrats were conflicted about our letter. The woman assigned to answer us wrote to say there were so many American citizens opposed to evolution that if the NSF put chemistry, geology, etc. into a single evolution division, it would be like sticking out our heads to be chopped off. Such a proposal, no matter its intellectual validity, would surely not fly! She said the NSF thought it would strengthen evolution science by avoidance of the word “evolution” and not by centralizing research activities.

Suzan Mazur: I’ve been critical about the NAS publication Science, Evolution, and Creationism. It’s a light treatment of the subject.

Lynn Margulis: Mealymouthed probably.

Suzan Mazur: Would you say there’s an evolution sea change taking place?

Lynn Margulis: Tell me more please.

Suzan Mazur: For instance, at the Rome conference there’s a full day of talks on “evolutionary mechanisms”.

Stuart Kauffman, one of the scientists presenting a paper on evolutionary mechanisms, told me in an interview about a year ago “there are some physicists who are asking questions like: Is natural selection an expression of some more general process?” That “it’s all up in the air”.

Richard Lewontin told me that natural selection occurs.

Antonio Lima-de-Faria says natural selection’s a political term not a scientific term.

Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci told me publicly that it’s both politics and science.

Lynn Margulis: Who first said it was a political term?

Suzan Mazur: Antonio Lima-de-Faria, the cytogeneticist from the University of Lund.

Lynn Margulis: From Lund. He’s Portuguese.

Suzan Mazur: Right.

Lynn Margulis: Good, good. Is he coming to Rome?

Suzan Mazur: He is not. I’ve had lots of dialogue with him.

Stuart Newman says natural selection should be relegated to a less important role in evolutionary science.

Stan Salthe says “Oh sure natural selection’s been demonstrated . . . however . . . it has rarely if ever been demonstrated to have anything to do with evolution in the sense of long-term changes in populations. . . .”

Lynn Margulis: That’s really what Salthe said?

Suzan Mazur: Yes. And he said that “the import of the Darwinian theory of evolution is just unexplainable caprice from top to bottom. What evolves is just what happened to happen.”

Philosopher Jerry Fodor, who’s co-writing a book What Darwin Got Wrong with physicist and linguist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, told me that “whatever the story turns out to be, it’s not going to be the selectionist story.”

Can you shed some light on what’s going on regarding the status and meaning of natural selection?

Lynn Margulis: I think I see the problem clearly. There is absolutely no doubt that natural selection itself can be measured every minute of the day in every population of organisms. Darwin was brilliant to make “natural selection” a sort of godlike term, an expression that could replace “God”, who did it — created life forms. However, what is “natural selection” really? It is the failure of biotic potential to be reached. And it’s quantitative.

Biotic potential is the intrinsic ability of any population to overgrow its environment by production of too many offspring. Whether born, hatched, budded or sporulated, all organisms potentially produce more offspring than can survive to reproduce themselves. Natural selection is intrinsically an elimination process. I’ll give you some specific examples.

My favorite one – I show this in a film and people just gasp. An ordinary bacterium – Proteus vulgaris – divides at the rate of every 15 minutes.

I have a time-lapse view of Proteus vulgaris where I show two hours of growth – 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc., until it fills the screen. I explain that if Proteus vulgaris continued to grow at this rate, not once a minute or once every 10 seconds, but once every 15 or 20 minutes, i.e., the way it really grows when it’s not limited, this bacterium would reach the mass of the Earth over a weekend.

It’s easy to show that the biotic potential measured as “number of offspring per unit time” (convertible of course into its equivalent “number of offspring per generation”) is never reached. Ever.

Darwin said the whole Earth could be covered by the progeny of a single pair of elephants.

Everybody knows that ancient chess story, one rice grain, two rice grains, four rice grains – you know what I’m talking about – the whole kingdom of rice at the end of the chess board = 2^64th!

Apparently, a maximum of 11 dachshund puppies can be born per litter. They have 3 litters a year, and therefore their biotic potential is: 33 puppies a year.

Let’s take a human example. For years the eldest woman reported to have delivered a live infant was a 59-year-old. The highest biotic potential described was 22 children per one single couple. This was the measurement of “human biotic potential”: “22 children per couple per generation”, and approximately equivalent to 22 children per 25 years.

Recently a Brazilian newspaper reported a couple, same Mom, same Pop, who had 32 children! Now each of those children, I can bet you, I don’t have to bet you, did not live to produce 32 children in the next generation. That has never occurred in the history of mankind. That point is — if you return 25 years later to the same Brazilian village, the original two parents will have been replaced, not by 32 but by another two descendants. The others died, moved away or, most likely, most failed to reproduce. That is simply elimination by “natural selection”, the failure of biotic potential to be reached. But that’s all. Simply no population ever reaches its biotic potential for long enough to do anything but measure it!

What then is natural selection? Natural selection is the failure to reach the potential, the maximum number of offspring that, in principle, can be produced by members of the specific species in question. This has been shown zillions of times in zillions of organisms.

Suzan Mazur: So you don’t agree that natural selection has rarely if ever been demonstrated to have anything to do with evolution in the sense of long-term changes in populations.

Lynn Margulis: Of course not. We have to unpack that misstatement. Growth is not simply enlargement by intake of food. It is no single process. In metazoans growth involves, at least intracellular motility including mitosis, protein synthesis, ATP energy generation, oxygen respiration, water intake and retention, salt balance, development and cell differentiation, and other related processes. The term “growth” tends to be slighted and misrepresented but it is far worse with the word “evolution”. The evolutionary process, intrinsically multi-componented, tends to be misunderstood by most people; it is often not even properly presented by those who purport to teach it! I think I understand it and can unpack it with complete equanimity. Natural selection occurs all the time. But natural selection as an elimination process, as failure to reach biotic potential, is not the issue.

Suzan Mazur: Salthe’s saying natural selection in terms of long-term changes in populations.

Lynn Margulis: I claim that long-term change also has been demonstrated. Such change over time is what the whole fossil record is about.

Suzan Mazur: He said it’s been demonstrated but rarely. . . .

What about Stuart Kauffman? He said natural selection may be “an expression of a more general process.”

Lynn Margulis: They are arguing about the entire evolutionary process. They are confused about its separable, measurable components. Darwin’s claim of “descent with modification” as caused by natural selection is a linguistic fallacy. They talk as if there were one single cause. As if natural selection were the cause. Although stated in your quotes, they respond to that which is left undefined. They do not respond to evolutionary evidence, to the results of the evolutionary process as documented in the fossil record. They tend to be ignorant about sedimentation, stratigraphy, taphonomy, diagenesis and other natural processes relevant to interpretation of direct fossil evidence for life’s evolution.

Darwin wrote about the Struggle for Life and attributed change to Natural Selection. He made it easy for his contemporaries to think and verbalize Mr. Big Omnipotent God in the Sky up there picking out those He wants to keep. He has been conceived of as The Natural Selector, He throws the others away.

Suzan Mazur: Your investigation of holistic science has revolutionized thinking about evolution. Your lab page carries the statement: “Our science seamlessly involves microbiology, cell biology, genetics, ecology, “soft rock” geology, astronomy, atmospheric sciences, metabolic organic and biochemistry.”

You’ve been critical of evolutionary science being too focused on animal investigation and not looking enough to more than two billion years that preceded the origin of animal species. What are your thoughts about what may have preceded biological evolution? Do you find Antonio Lima-de-Faria’s idea interesting about atomic, chemical, mineral, chemical levels of evolution?

Lynn Margulis: Evolution is not the appropriate word. “Evolution” just means change through time. But yes there has been “change though time” at many levels.

Suzan Mazur: Are you saying you agree there are four levels?

Lynn Margulis: I don’t know what Lima-de-Faria’s four levels are. I’m familiar only with his good work on cells from years ago.

Suzan Mazur: What about his ideas about biological periodicity, where he describes the flatworm, for instance, having male genitals as developed as those of the human male, the placenta turning up in assorted species across time, along with traits like luminescence, the capacity to fly, etc.

Lynn Margulis: I assume he’s talking about convergent evolution.

Suzan Mazur: No he doesn’t consider this convergent evolution. What he’s saying is that the cell is not able to put together protons, neutrons, and electrons to build a zinc, a cobalt, a magnesium or an iron atom. He says these atoms come from the external environment and that “it is not surprising that the functions and structures of the cell were obliged to follow and perpetuate the periodicity inherent in the chemical elements and the minerals.” So that periodicity in biology, similar patterns that arise in different animals and plants, this sudden emergence of functions in mammals that first occurred in earlier invertebrates, for example, may be “directly correlated with periodicity at the level of the chemical elements”.

Lynn Margulis: I haven’t followed his papers in recent years, but I’m delighted to hear that he’s working and publishing at 87.

About minerals, no doubt minerals are deeply involved in evolution. No doubt. At least 20 elements of the periodic table are absolutely and uniquely required for life today, according to Bob Williams, Oxford University Professor of Chemistry.

He showed that in addition to “CHNOPS” (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur) — now up to 20 elements are essential to living organisms today. Earlier the number probably was lower. These elements can’t be substituted for each other.

If manganese is needed, magnesium won’t work. And if magnesium is required for a certain enzyme, selenium won’t substitute.

And the thing about the crystals of the elements, their mineralogical features, is that unlike components in biology when a pure substance is made of those chemical elements – there is identity. Elements are as identical as anything can be; this is not true of cells.

Suzan Mazur: Do you find the concept of morphogenetic fields interesting, which Scott Gilbert and Rudolf Raff have given some thought to, as well as Stuart Pivar with his focus on “biological structuralism” based on evolutionary changes of the torus? And Mark McMenamin’s recent description in Paleotorus of the Seilacher tongue fossil as a flattened metazoan torus (convergence of longitudinal lines near the poles), an Ediacaran toroid? Mark McMenamin says this is an example of morphogenetic fields.

Lynn Margulis: The person who does promote the “morphogenetic fields” concept is Rupert Sheldrake, of course.

I haven’t had a chance to look at the Paleotorus manuscript. I’m unfamiliar with torus thinking. But I’m very familiar with Mark McMenamin and his work. I’ve been in the field with him, he is a co-author. His analysis of Ediacara biota “metacellularity” is excellent. It is a kind of multicellularity but it’s not “metazoan metacellularity“. I think he’s probably right that Ediacaran metacellularity differs from both plants and the familiar animal multicellularity. Animal tissue cells differentiate specific structures that include desmosomes, septate junctions, synapses, tight junctions and others. Plant cells are connected by plasmodesmata. I suspect the Ediacara biota comprised mostly syncitial protoctists that, in any case, as McMenamin and Dolf Seilacher show, were not animals.

Suzan Mazur: I believe you’ve made the statement that the “neo-Darwinists are a minor twentieth-century”, now twenty-first century, “religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon Biology.”

Lynn Margulis: I did.

Suzan Mazur: Richard Dawkins gave a speech last year at the School of Ethical Culture in Manhattan where he was questioned from the audience about his embracing Darwinism as a religion And he said “I’m guilty” and I will make an effort to “reform”.

Lynn Margulis: Good! Let me mention a marvelous book by Ronald W. Clark called The Survival of Charles Darwin. The first half or so of the book is Darwin, Darwinism and Darwin in his day. The second half is neo-Darwinism as it happened after Darwin’s death. It describes beautifully the political and social pressures on neo-Darwinism.

The story is connected to Mendelian genetics. Gregor Mendel was no monk in some very quiet garden in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic. He was a well-educated, fine naturalist who stayed in touch with the pope. He was aware of Darwin’s views of change. Mendel’s concepts were marvelous, scientifically impeccable.

I’ll give you a simplified example comparable to Mendel’s sweet pea botanical breeding work. Red flowers and white flowers breed true generation after generation. Red have red offspring. White crossed with white have all white offspring. But a hybrid cross of the breeding red with the breeding white flowers yields all pink flowers. When you cross the pink ones amongst each other, the offspring flowers are just as red or just as white as the parents or the grandparents.

The point is Mendel showed that the changes in heredity are mixtures, but they’re pure. Pink parents produce red, white and pink offspring like parents or grandparents. No evolution of novelty occurs at all because exactly the same hereditary “factors” begun with are transmitted and remain pure through all subsequent generations. Mendel envisaged “factors” (now “genes”) that do not change through time.

Mendel rejected the evolution stuff in the air at his time as bunk. He states the laws of heredity yes, but none leads to change or speciation.

Then Darwin writes that if there are no “gradual changes through time”, his theory is wrong. So whatever else Darwin said, he certainly made it very clear that there were changes in life through time and those changes can be inherited. The basic point was the perceived contradiction between Mendel’s claim of heritable total stability and Darwin’s description of change. Only the inherited changes, he wrote, “are of interest to us”.

What I think is that both Mendel and Darwin, except for Darwin’s insistence on gradualism at the fossil record level, were correct. The changes through time are absolutely documented. The sciences of paleontology and paleobiology document change and common ancestry through time. But in detail those changes tend to be more discontinuous, saltatory (“punctuated equilibrium”) than Darwin’s great expectations of them.

Then some smart-ass Cambridge mathematicians – cocktail-party types – J.B.S. Haldane, who was brilliant beyond words, and R.A. Fisher, an algebraicist as well, tried to reconcile the stability of Mendel’s inheritance “factors” (which Johannsen later called “genes”) with Darwin’s insistence on change.

Darwin was a geologist. He tried to trace lineages through time. He observed examples of extinction and appearance of life forms in the fossil record. Much fossil life is not like that of today but it’s close enough so that we know that the extinct organisms were directly related to descendants of today, e.g., that dinosaurs were related to today’s reptiles, etc.

And what Haldane, Fisher, Sewell Wright, Hardy, Weinberg et al. did was invent. They took genetics and made up “population genetics”, based on the extrapolation of Mendel’s rules. The superstructure is a theoretical one that ran away with the entire so-called “field”. The neo-Darwinism after Darwin’s death claimed to have resolved the Darwin (change)-Mendel (no change) contradiction.

X-rays were then revealed by Hermann J. Muller to cause mutation. Those genes do change. Any organism was envisaged to be made of its alphabet of genes: A, B, c, d, E, F, G, h, I, J, k . . . all the way to Z. (The A-to-Z-total is the organism’s genome.) “Big A” mutates back to “little a” and “little a” changes back to “big A” in a reciprocal fashion at a measurable rate. The notion is that if we accumulate enough gene change, enough genetic mutations, we explain the passage from one species to another. This is depicted as two branches in a family tree that emerge from one common ancestor to the two descendants. An entire Anglophone academic tradition of purported evolutionary description was developed quantified, computerized based on what I think is a conceptual topological error.

Suzan Mazur: How are you doing at Oxford?

Lynn Margulis: I’m thriving, I have found excellent colleagues and friends in this place of the three “B’s”: biophilia, bibliophilia and bicyclophilia. However, I admit I feel burdened by neo-Darwinist tradition that still prevails among so many that has little to do with me, and what I feel compelled to ignore as useless for my own research.

The Anglophone tradition was taught. I was taught and so were my contemporaries. And so were the younger scientists. Evolution was defined as “changes in gene frequencies in natural populations”. The accumulation of genetic mutations were touted to be enough to change one species into another.

Furthermore, it was admitted, from the very beginning because it was measurable, that more than 99% of all detectable mutations, heritable changes were negative, mutations were mainly deleterious. They rationalized. One sees that less than 1% of genetic mutations, measurable heritable change, are not deleterious. They are presumably favorable. If enough favorable mutations occur, was the erroneous extrapolation, a change from one species to another would concurrently occur.

Suzan Mazur: So a certain dishonesty set in?

Lynn Margulis: No. It was not dishonesty. I think it was wish-fulfillment and social momentum. Assumptions, made but not verified, were taught as fact.

Suzan Mazur: But a whole industry grew up.

Lynn Margulis: Yes, but people are always more loyal to their tribal group than to any abstract notion of “truth” — scientists especially. If not they are unemployable. It is professional suicide to continually contradict one’s teachers or social leaders.

Suzan Mazur: Frank Turner, director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale has told me that scientists are “the most successful intellectuals in securing public funds” and in exchange for government grants agree to work to “ensure better health, economic stability and national security”. Do you agree with that description and how do you feel about scientists in effect having to take a pledge to ensure national security in order to get funding for their labs?

Lynn Margulis: We did research that’s directly related to the anthrax bacteria. First, you’re talking here about American science. And secondly, you probably mean NSF, and even worse DARPA-funded science.

Scientists in general need funds. An aspect of science that is less true of the humanities or arts, is that they must chase money because the rate of cash flow must increase to increase research activity. Scientists almost always need equipment, materials, man-power, in short, money. All except some theoretical scientists need money and, for research results to be accurate and meaningful even the “theoretikers” must work with experimentalists who always need money.

So the economic system to me is such that university people, like most everyone else, maximize the rate of cash flow per square foot of institutional space. That is the main pressure. Scientists, like anyone else, follow the money flow. Many are entirely honest about it. Some of them will make bombs. Most won’t go that far. The humanities and philosophy scholars receive far less public and corporate money because, in general, what they do is not perceived as practical. All they do is make books and teach esoterica to students.

Suzan Mazur: But in making this agreement to ensure better health, economic stability and national security — does this affect the science? Does it constrain science? Is this one of the problems we have, why we’re stuck in old science regarding evolution? Is there a certain “cycle of submission” at play here?

Lynn Margulis: Yes, some aspect of this prevails. But evolution in addition has peculiar problems. Yes, science is traditional. But I think it does have a self-correcting feature to it – people die basically. It takes a few generations to self-correct.

Suzan Mazur: Is it too soon for an international gathering of holistic evolutionary science where mineralogists powwow with cell biologists, etc. and the conference is streamed over the Internet? Or is there still not enough of a common language?

Lynn Margulis: Yes there is some common scientific language but only among a limited number of people. Some have already met. Do you know Lisdisfarne’s William Irwin Thompson?

Suzan Mazur: No I don’t.

Lynn Margulis: He’s an honest guy, profoundly well-educated, he is a scholar who founded the Lindisfarne Fellowship that for 25 years or so was funded mainly by Laurance A. Rockefeller, who had great confidence in Thompson. He admires science and thinks broadly, like a scientist, but enjoys many other intellectual concerns. He tends to learn science although he’s not a scientist himself. He’s just a fabulous intellectual. Basically he’s a cultural critic.

Suzan Mazur: But we haven’t had a conference where all these people come together and it’s streamed on the Internet. We’ve had conferences with books, CDs and videos generated where most of the public is not let in.

And mainstream media is retarded when it covers evolutionary science.

Lynn Margulis: Individual people in the mainstream media try to report comprehensively but are stopped because the mainstream media won’t publish what it doesn’t like or understand. Also, often the excellent scientists can’t explain themselves in a way other people understand.

Suzan Mazur: Should the language be broken down a little like legal jargon has been simplified?

Lynn Margulis: Let’s finish our conversation about the components of evolution and with what aspect I disagree. So much of evolution can not be disagreed with by someone who calls himself a scientist. One component is natural selection. Natural selection occurs.

Suzan Mazur: Lima-de-Faria’s definition of evolution includes the nonbiological and does not include natural selection. Mineralogist Bob Hazen has said that we need to define these terms. People are not in agreement about what evolution or selection is.

Why should Bob Hazen be left out of the conversation because he’s a mineralogist?

Lynn Margulis: He isn’t left out.

Suzan Mazur: Well he is in the sense that his friend Niles Eldredge told me: “He’s [Bob Hazen's] a mineralogist. He’s not an evolutionary biologist. So be careful.”

Lynn Margulis: Well Niles Eldredge, a wonderful friend and colleague of mine, is talking about those scientists who derive from zoology. He probably refers to the deliberate intellectual activity that reconciles Mendelian stability with Darwinian gradual change and tries to force it into this procrustean population genetics neo-Darwinism.

Francisco Ayala is presenting at the “evolutionary mechanisms session” in Rome. He was trained in Catholicism, Spanish-style, as a Dominican. We were in California at a meeting with Whiteheadian philosopher John Cobb. At that meeting Ayala agreed with me when I stated that this doctrinaire neo-Darwinism is dead. He was a practitioner of neo-Darwinism but advances in molecular genetics, evolution, ecology, biochemistry, and other news had led him to agree that neo-Darwinism’s now dead.

The components of evolution (I don’t think any scientist disagrees) that exist because there’s so much data for them are: (1) the tendency for exponential growth of all populations — that is growth beyond a finite world; and (2) since the environment can’t sustain them, there’s an elimination process of natural selection.

The point of contention in science is here: (3) Where does novelty that’s heritable come from? What is the source of evolutionary innovation? Especially positive inherited innovation, where does it come from?

It is here that the neo-Darwinist knee-jerk reaction kicks in. “By random mutations that accumulate so much that you have a new lineage.” This final contention, their mistake in my view, is really the basis of nearly all our disagreement.

Everybody agrees: Heritable variation exists, it can be measured. Everybody agrees, as Darwin said, it’s heritable variation “that’s important to us” because variation is inherited. Everyone agrees “descent with modification” can be demonstrated. And furthermore, because of molecular biology, everybody agrees that all life on Earth today is related through common ancestry, as Darwin showed.

Everybody agrees with ultimate common ancestry of Earth’s life, because the DNA, RNA messenger, transfer RNA, membrane-bounded cell constituents (lipids, the phospholipids) that we share – they’re all virtually identical in all life today, it’s all one single lineage. So that part of Darwinism – that we’re all related by common ancestry –no scientist disagrees with.

The real disagreement about what the neo-Darwinists tout, for which there’s very little evidence, if any, is that random mutations accumulate and when they accumulate enough, new species originate. The source of purposeful inherited novelty in evolution, the underlying reason the new species appear, is not random mutation rather it is symbiogenesis, the acquisition of foreign genomes.

When Salthe says we haven’t seen that, he’s talking about new species. He’s not saying we haven’t seen natural selection, he’s saying we haven’t seen natural selection produce new species, this particular aspect of neo-Darwinism.

Suzan Mazur: Were you invited to the Altenberg event? The Extended Synthesis meeting in July in Altenberg, Austria?

Lynn Margulis: No. I don’t know anybody who was.

Suzan Mazur: Stuart Newman.

Lynn Margulis: I don’t know Stuart Newman.

Suzan Mazur: His theory of form based on a pattern language he calls dynamical patterning modules was the centerpiece at Altenberg.

He proposes that all 35 or so animal phyla physically self-organized from single-celled organisms without a genetic recipe by the time of the Cambrian explosion half a billion years ago using this pattern language of DPMs. Natural selection supposedly followed.

Lynn Margulis: But they all use the word “multicellular” when they really mean “animal” — since there are no unicellular animals, and since multicellularity, genuine multicellularity, details of multicellularity, are known in protoctists, bacteria and all the major groups of life. He can’t be correct in his claim of a lack of “genetic recipe” in life prior to animals. Every single cell lineage has DNA genes and has generated multicellular descendants. Some bacteria like Gomphosphaeria are always multicellular in all stages of development.

Many are unaware of this. Zoologists often display their dangerous ignorance; they play with 1/5th of the deck in biology. They belong to a thought style I don’t share.

The problem is that many fine scientists recognize genuine difficulties with the “standard model” of evolution, so to speak. However, most lack conceptual tools to solve the difficulties they legitimately recognize. They think they understand processes, like speciation [which in fact, is due mostly to karyotypic fissioning, symbiogenesis and cross-species hybridogenesis (as larval transfer)]. All of these are anastomoses. They are mergers of ancestral lineages. They can not realize that “development” is really microbial ecology and community successional change. These are entire traditions dismissed as “of historical interest only”, fields “modern scientists” tend to know little or nothing about.

Suzan Mazur: Do you have any comment on various numbers of genes humans are reported to have?

Lynn Margulis: What is the current number? 25,000?

Suzan Mazur: Well they’re saying 20,000 – 25,000 up to 30,000. Then I interviewed industrialist and philanthropist David Koch, who’s on the board at MIT, and he said he sat in on a meeting with some Nobel Prize winners there and in their discussion of genes the numbers ranged from 15,000 to 30,000.

Lynn Margulis: That is only a factor of two, nearly nothing. When they are off by factors of a million (10^5th or 10^6th) or, for example, off by 10^20th, then it is serious, it is time to examine the inevitable unstated assumption or unjustified extrapolations.

Suzan Mazur: But they don’t know what the gene really is at this point or what its origin is.

Lynn Margulis: I wouldn’t say that. Many know the genes as nucleotide sequences in DNA. But they have pre-conceived notions about “programmed organisms determined by DNA” and “accumulation of random mutations”, etc. that interfere with learning. These are scientific beliefs that, in their preconceptions, are like all the rest of the religions to which people are prone.

I have not explicitly told you what I think is the major source of novelty in evolution, i.e., what heritable genetic variation does lead to speciation? If, as I claim, heritable variation mostly does NOT come from gradual accumulation of random mutation, what does generate Darwin’s variation upon which his Natural Selection can act? A fine scientific literature on this theme actually exists and grows every day but unfortunately it is scattered, poorly understood and neglected nearly entirely by the money-powerful, the publicity mongers of science and the media. Worse, much of it is not written in English or well-indexed. This literature shows that symbiogenesis, interspecific fusions (hybridogenesis, gene transfers of various types, karyotypic fissioning, and other forms of acquisition of “foreign genomes” or epigenesis) are more important than the slow gradual accumulation of mutation or sexual mergers. If you are interested at all in this literature start with our Sciencewriters book Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (Margulis & Sagan, Basic Books, NY paperback).

Suzan Mazur: I know you don’t make an issue of being a woman in science and your concept of symbiogenesis is rooted in your predecessors who you think got it right (like Boris Mikhailovich Kozo-Polyansky’s 1924 analysis soon to appear in English translation), but would you say the idea of evolution by cooperation is still largely something difficult for men of science to embrace and that may be why the “survival of the fittest crowd” are still so dug in?

Lynn Margulis: The problem is NOT “competition versus cooperation”. Those words are totally inappropriate for life. The language of life is metabolic chemistry. Even bankers and sports teams have to cooperate in order to compete. It’s crucial to realize that it doesn’t matter what team you’re on, when you compete, even in sports where the term is valid, you still cooperate!

*************

Suzan Mazur is the author of Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Her interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her team of the 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints at Laetoli. Suzan Mazur’s reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

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