Stu wrote:Well not sure about a "vast scientific conspiracy to withhold and misrepresent the truth"..... wait hang on, according to this there might very well be a "vast scientific Darwinian clique that try oppose anything in opposition to it" though.
Mimivirus discoverer doubts Darwin, banned from publication in France
Controversial and outspoken, Raoult last year published a popular science book that flat-out declares that Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong. And he was temporarily banned from publishing in a dozen leading microbiology journals in 2006. Scientists at Raoult’s lab say they wouldn’t want to work anywhere else. Yet Raoult is also known for his enmities and his disdain for those who disagree with him.
A search for the truth? Hmm no, it seems group-think, enforcers (NCSE) and intimidation rule the day.
Recommendation: Take a step back and look at the whole picture. Then evaluate the above comment in light of the other sections quoted below.
First of all, where was this profile published? In
Science, possibly one of the two most prestigious (along with
Nature ) science journals in existence. Is this consistent with intimidation?
Some quotes from
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6072/1033.full:
But today, at 59, he's the most productive and influential microbiologist in France, leading a team of 200 scientists and students at the University of Aix-Marseille, here in the city where he came of age.
He is being intimidated and the truth suppressed?
Yet Raoult is also known for his enmities and his disdain for those who disagree with him. “People don't like to talk about him because he has a lot of influence. He can make life hard for you,” says one of several French researchers contacted by Science who would only talk about Raoult if they could remain anonymous.
And he is the one being suppressed and intimidated?
“For foreign students, Raoult's lab is a springboard [to a career],” says microbiologist Patricia Renesto of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, who spent several years in Raoult's lab and admires him. “The flip side is that he controls everything. He can behave odiously,” she adds. “Raoult has that fatherly family spirit, which some people don't understand,” Brouqui says.
Springboard to a career? Shouldn't association with him have the opposite effect?
Raoult's entire opus appears to be written in big numbers. A recent PubMed search showed him as an author on more than 1400 papers, including the description of more than 60 new bacterial species and one new bacterial genus, which Drancourt named Raoultella.
I can understand one paper slipping through the NCSE blockade, but 1400?
But some scientists grumble that manuscripts out of Raoult's lab often contain errors, for instance, as a result of unchecked genetic sequences.
Indeed, problems in a paper about a mouse model for typhus got his lab in hot water in 2006. A reviewer for Infection and Immunity, a journal published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), discovered that four figures in a revised manuscript were identical to figures in the original manuscript, even though they were supposed to describe a different experiment.
In letters to ASM, made available by Raoult, second author Christian Capo and last author Jean-Louis Mège, a group leader, accepted “full responsibility” for the problem, which they said involved only two figures. Capo, in his letter, wrote that he had made an innocent mistake; Mège wrote that Capo had subsequently failed to show the revised manuscript to other authors, who were on vacation, before resubmitting it. But after consulting its ethics panel, ASM banned all five authors, including Raoult, from publishing in its journals for a year. “We are not entirely comfortable with the explanation provided,” ASM officials wrote to M—ge. “Misrepresentation of data … is an affront to the ethical conduct of scientific inquiry.”
A different view than implied by Uncommon Descent.
Capo and Mège accepted the decision, but Raoult wrote ASM that he wasn't at fault and that the “collective punishment” was “very unfair.” He appealed the ban, also on behalf of two other co-authors, but lost. Furious, he resigned from the editorial board of two other ASM journals, canceled his membership in the American Academy of Microbiology, ASM's honorific leadership group, and banned his lab from submitting to ASM journals, in which he had published more than 230 studies. His name has been on only two ASM journal papers since, both published in 2010.
Who's banning whom?
Still, the affair does not appear to have dented Raoult's career. From 2013 onward, he will head a new government-funded academic medical center of excellence that will combine the expertise of various research and medical agencies in infectious and tropical diseases in Marseille.
More failures by the NCSE and its minions.
And then there is his popular science book Dépasser Darwin (Beyond Darwin). “Darwin was a priest,” Raoult says, claiming that the image of the tree of life that Darwin proposed is inspired from the Bible. “It also is too simplistic.” Raoult questions several other tenets of modern evolutionary theory, including the importance of natural selection. He says recent discoveries in genetics show how frequently genes are exchanged not just between different microbial species but also between microbes and complex organisms, for instance, in the human gut. That means de novo creation of entirely new species is possible, Raoult argues, and Darwin's branching tree of life should be replaced by a network of interconnected species.
“It's dangerous to say those things,” says Moreira, who worries that Raoult is providing creationist groups with ammunition. “He goes a bit too far,” says Eugene Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda. “Darwin's theory is relevant but is incomplete. It does not apply to the evolution of microorganisms.”
Hmmm, does Moreira have a point?
Compare the Summary at Uncommon Descent with the actual article. Is the Summary an accurate representation?
