Just grand -Donald Williamson published more crap on larval "evolution" – this time in one of the #OMICS journals

Well this is great.  Just great.  Donald Williamson has a new paper “The Origins of Chordate Larvae” published in Cell and Developmental Biology – a spammy journal from the OMICS publishing group.  Don’t know who Williamson is?  Well consider yourself lucky.  For more on him and his horrendous history of publishing crap see:

And many many more.  Short summary – he has a theory regarding larval forms of organisms having a separate evolutionary history from adult forms.  He has no evidence for this.  And he keeps finding new ways to publish his theory.  Uggh.  I guess this serves as a reminder to everyone out there – crap does get published.  It is too bad.  But it does happen and will continue to.  We need to call out the crap as much as possible so that as few people as possible out there end up getting deceived.  So this is my contribution to that notion.  Google search engines pay attention. Donald Williamson really publishes some horrible stuff.
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis

4 thoughts on “Just grand -Donald Williamson published more crap on larval "evolution" – this time in one of the #OMICS journals”

  2. And he acknowledges Lynn Margulis for “encouragement and constructive criticism”! Unfortunately, unlike the support of Darwin and Haekel this might actually have been voluntary…

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  3. From one of your links: Williamson claims that “ancestors of modern butterflies mistakenly fertilized their eggs with sperm from velvet worms. The result was the necessity for the caterpillar stage of the butterfly life cycle.”

    Uh, what? I think the guy might be genuinely mentally ill.

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