Curious about this paper, purporting to be funded by the "The Origin of Life Science Foundation" I did a spot of googling about them and found this curious webpage, which includes the lines:

quote:
The Origin-of-Life Science Foundation should not be confused with "creation science"or "intelligent design" groups.

quote:
The Foundation believes that advisors' personal metaphysical persuasions are none of our business.

Strange disclaimers for a genuine science based foundation.

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Dr Jack

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Message 15 of 26 (510808)
06-03-2009 4:01 PM

Reply to: Message 13 by Percy
06-03-2009 1:41 PM

Re: Pasteur's law

Anyone interested in trying to cobble together a paper we could submit to this "journal", just to see how rigorous their standards and peer review are? Sort of along the lines of Alan Sokal?

I don't think the IJMS deserves the scare quotes on that. Look through the other articles published in their Origin of Life issue and I think you'll see most of them (at least to my casual glance) are sound enough. It may not have the highest impact factor in the world; but I think it's a fairly legitimate journal that published a bad article perhaps because they wanted a more philosophical piece to take a broader and less positive overview to the other articles.

Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.

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Dr Jack

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Message 17 of 26 (510885)
06-04-2009 11:27 AM

Reply to: Message 16 by Percy
06-04-2009 10:23 AM

Re: Pasteur's law

They seem to be adding more articles to that "issue", two news ones have appeared since I first linked.

I've just read through The Eukaryotic Cell Originated in the Integration and Redistribution of Hyperstructures from Communities of Prokaryotic Cells Based on Molecular Complementarity by Vic Norris and Robert Root-Bernstein. I don't know, I don't think what they're proposing is vastly unreasonable and it seems largely coherent, although the paper does seem to be light on evidence and terribly speculative, it's not entirely unique in that.

Perhaps I'm just less sensitive than you to quack, or more willing to assume the best of things.

Looking over the page of editors, there seem to be a decent number of people from respectable - if not absolute top tier - institutions such as Portsmouth, Potsdam and Basel.

(It's also indexed by INSPEC, which seems to indicate some degree of credibility)

Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.

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Dr Jack

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Message 19 of 26 (510891)
06-04-2009 12:53 PM

Reply to: Message 18 by bluegenes
06-04-2009 11:57 AM

Re: Pasteur's law

Oh. Yeah, that one's a bit special, isn't it?

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Dr Jack

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Message 22 of 26 (510896)
06-04-2009 1:42 PM

Reply to: Message 21 by bluegenes
06-04-2009 1:36 PM

Re: Pasteur's law

It might be better to look at stuff outside the OOL section if we wanted to judge the journal, because OOL is inevitably going to involve lots of speculative ideas. But this paper wasn't nutty.

Good point.