Twisted Tree of Life Award: University of Nebraska Lincoln Press Release on Archaeal Epigenetics

Well this one is really painful.  So painful I am re-starting my "Twisted Tree of Life" Award posts here.

See Tweets about it below:

A lot of pretty painful evolution babble in this press release about archaea epigenetic: Evolution sans mutation discovered in single-celled archaea https://t.co/aumbdfhU4R #TwistedTreeOfLife

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) December 10, 2018

For example - there is a claim that this might have something to do with why archaea don't produce antibiotics which would at best be an evolution just so story except for the part where archaea do produce antibiotics (eg Halocins)

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) December 10, 2018

And then there is this whole things about how this raises questions about how archaea and eukaryotes came to adopt epigenetics .. interesting except it ignores that bacteria have epigenetics too

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) December 10, 2018

And then there is "Species most often evolve through DNA mutations inherited by successive generations" which alas ignores this little thing called recombination

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) December 10, 2018

Mind you, the paper looks interesting -- but this PR is really just many levels of awful

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) December 10, 2018

And here is another doozy "“The surprise is that it’s in these relatively primitive organisms, which we know to be ancient,” -- uggh - these are modern organisms - they are neither primitive nor ancient

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) December 10, 2018

And this "Evidence for it had emerged only in eukaryotes, the multicellular domain of life that comprises animals, plants & several other kingdoms." except epigenetics is known in bacteria AND eukaryotes are not a $(&*&$# "multicellular domain of life" - what the actual fu*#@?

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) December 10, 2018

And sorry but to say epigenetics is hard to study in humans so therefore we should study it in archaea b/ they are easy is, well a bit crazy -- how about yeast? Drosophila? Mouse? Arabidopsis? Corn? I mean I love archaea, but Sulfolobus is not easy ...

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) December 10, 2018