Wakelet of UC Davis "Research Quality and Design Symposium"

Made a mini Wakelet:

And today in the Twisted Tree of Life Award - the only way to study evolution is to try and make fake reconstructions of past events

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Meh - not a fan of this article "Go Ahead, Prove that Eukaryotic Cells Arose
Via Endosymbiosis" https://t.co/P3xjoItYhO 1/n

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) January 10, 2019

Mind you - the article being discussed sounds nice but the part I don't like is logic here which in essence says "5000 papers in which evolutionary analysis supported endosymbiosis theory are useless" 2/n pic.twitter.com/AaiwqTM1Gx

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) January 10, 2019

And that the right and only way to do evolutionary inference is by trying to recreate something that happened a billion years ago in an artificial system using yeast - completely and utterly ridiculous actually 3/n

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) January 10, 2019

This article basically discounts all evolutionary analysis and ends with this inane and totally BS line about this artificial reconstruction "Next to having been there, this is as good as it gets" 4/n

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) January 10, 2019

This to be is akin to saying "We cannot study history through analysis of archaeology or texts or artifacts but only by creating simulations of historical events in Minecraft or other artificial worlds" 5/n

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) January 10, 2019

I mean this is remarkably similar to anti-evolution / Intelligent design arguments “If you did not observe it, you can’t prove evolution happened” #aaargh 6/n

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) January 10, 2019

He even writes “Seeing is believing” - basically discounting all evolutionary inference and following the Intelligent Design logic for critiquing evolution 7/n

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) January 10, 2019

The more I consider this the more troubled I am by it - basically, he is saying "Any evolutionary study that is not either direct observation, or a recreation attempt, even if that attempt is barely connected to the theory, is not to be believed" 8/n

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) January 10, 2019