And the fun is going on!

From climate-sceptics to Jean Staune and from Jean Staune to Vincent Fleury and his blog, where I found that!

Followed the links to:

• To Explain the Origin of Animal Body Plans, Here’s What May Be the Most Inadequate Proposal Yet
• More on the Stretched-Rubber Theory of Body Plans

Pathetic CNRS guy is still pathetic!

[edit] more…

• Still No Basis for Stretched-Rubbery Theory of Body-Plan Origins: An Exchange with Vincent Fleury

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@vf #233

@vf #233

Fleury,

I know that :

We’ve been watching cells move (or not move) in embryos for a long, long time. There are no vortices of cell movement centering around the navel. Period.

Your model claim four counterrotating vortices centered around the navel. You failed to make your point by simply displaying them, since August 18, 2007 when I first tried to understand how those vortices could specify the limbs fields, as you also claim. That I know.

That’s a minor point concerning your model and your claims that :

The pattern of tetrapods exist in the platonician space of forms, just like the sphere. You can write its essence without evolutionnary arguments.

But it makes clear how you deal with reality, through the distorting lens of what boils down as an ideological a priori.

Your paper contain other examples of this particular behavior. Including inexistent data driven conclusions. Falsely reported results of colleagues. Imaginary correlations. Etc. How much do you think it takes for someone to decide to not take you seriously anymore? IMO you crossed the threshold by several orders of magnitude, several times.

It’s so easy to prove you wrong that I suspect the only support you can get is through ideologically related people (this includes Jean Staune, the “neolamarckian structuralist neo-creationist approaches from our local, Templeton Foundation supported, anti-Darwin bigot I was talking about”) or your Ecole Polytechnique centered network.
My guess: you will get more and more of the first type and less and less of the second one if you persist to follow your actual line of conduct.

You continuously and mostly inappropriately use the words “misconduct” and “defamatory“. I wonder how you qualify your way to deal with scientific critics by trying to silence them: by addressing their boss, or trying to shut down their blog (in my case), or threatening to sue them, instead of proving your point of view as one could expect from a scientist.

You sent, some time ago, an e-mail to my boss, hoping to silence me. Your message went down the drain (his computer’s trash actually) after he sent me a copy; which you didn’t judged convenient to do.
You have done the same for PZ Myers and people laugh at you and that’s the normal way things go, fortunately.
Maybe sometime you will learn that the hierarchical superiors may interfere with stuff on the web servers of the university, or letters with their lab’s address but not any private activity of their staff. You should have addressed your letter to the Scienceblogs editor, not the dean of the UMM.

In the past you have tried to distort what was said concerning your model and made me publish part of private messages to prove you wrong. You have also tried to rephrase what I have said, to make it sound favorable to your claims. You have done that again in your recent comment I’m answering here:

In addition, you aggregate with Mr Oldcola, who knows perfectly well that tehre are vortices.

.
I really don’t appreciate this and if you continue on the same line I’ll reconsider the proposal of Nerd of Redhead to contact your superiors at the MSC lab and university. Not to make it stop by asking them to use their authority, just to be sure that your cercle vertueux des laboratoires is aware of the kind of person you are and the way you act.

I’ll put my appreciation of your hypothesis and your ideological drives, clearly stated here, so you will be able in the future to link to it – using one of your favorite expressions:

bullshit; a big pile of stinking bullshit

and this applies particularly to your cteappv paper. The editorial board of EPJ should be ashamed to have accept it for publication.

Hope that this is clear enough. Grab the URL and use it as necessary.

Your comments always welcome will be published after copy was sent to Dr di Meglio.

time is telling

A few days ago Dr Fleury wrote me a quite short message, with just the subject line “time is telling” and a paper attached :

Who moves whom during primitive streak formation in the chick embryo, Manli Chuai and Cornelis J. Weijer, HFSP J. 2009 April; 3(2): 71–76. Published online 2009 March 31. doi: 10.2976/1.3103933.

comment

Just posted this to Pharyngula at the “An ontogeny of toilet drain behavior” thread

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Very nice from Dr Fleury to finally inform us of what L2/R2 could be. Never late to do well. The funny thing is that he commented here but haven’t send me a message about it! That’s weird. I’m asking for evidence concerning L2R2 since august 2007.

Let’s see what we have here anyway.

The first pair of vortices Fleury claims as R1L1 are shown by CuiC et al [Dev Biol. 2005 Aug 1;284(1):37-47. doi:10.1016/j.ydbio.2005.04.021, during stages ~1-3+.

For more than 2 years the presence of the R2L2 vortices was assumed to be visible during the same developmental period and modeled as the result of a single phenomenon.

The second pair of vortices Fleury claims as R2L2, presumably shown here, are situated between stages ~8-9+. They traveled in time!

Assuming that we have evidence for R2L2, the model presented by Fleury describing simultaneously the two pairs, R1L1 and R2L2, must be wrong and he should recall his paper (doi: 10.1051/epjap/2009033) and clarify this point (along with correcting everything else) before submitting it again.

Unfortunately, it seem’s that the cell trajectories are manually spotted, the green color must not mislead anybody to confuse it as GFP expression, which is the case with Weijer’s lab experiments. Manual spotting is not the best technique to follow a particular cell population during a process where everything is moving in 3D. Not even ink or membrane dyes were used!

The first gif file even as annotated by Fleury don’t show any vortex.

The second gif file is even worse, it is obvious that the 2D depiction of the vortices is just false, sorry Dr Fleury, the cells/tissues movement is in 3D, you can’t just get a projection in 2D and try to make it look as you would like it to be. This seems to be a recurrent problem. The animation starts when the 8th pair of somites is forming at stage 9+, always faraway in time.

Let me summarize Dr Fleury:

IF those are the R2L2, the vortices contributing to the formation of the hindlimbs THEN

the previous positioning at stages 1 through 3+ was false, as I have argued the last 2+ years

AND

the published models are false [cteappv (2009) & epmag (2005)]

AND that have nothing to do anymore with a 2D flow you claim to be at the origin of the tetrapods.

Now, we don’t really think we have evidence from a 2D manual projection of a 3D moving structure, in the absence of a tissular marker.

And I wonder what you will prefer, drop your model which assumes a (almost) 2D cellular layer and a hyperbolic flow forming simultaneously the four vortices, or try to get more consistent evidence (if any available).

old URL & old rule coming back

[repost]

So, Vincent Fleury always unable to deal with the scientific content of his publication seek other means to shut down critics.

It will be rather difficult.

cteappv is back

I had a short exchange of messages with Mark from the ToS Reports department of WordPress.com.

First of all I would like to thank Mark, not for restoring my account, but, for the clarity of his replies, which is not often the case with people I had to communicate for other issues on various blogging platforms.

Anyway, I haven’t decided yet if I will continue with WordPress.com, confirm my migration back to Blogger, or have a WordPress blog hosted by some other provider than WordPress.com. I’ll need legal advice for the matter 😉

The comment with Fleury’s IP and professional e-mail is hold for editing and it will certainly not contain the same info when it will come back. The info is available for who needs it via channels that don’t involve WordPress.com, but I think it’s not necessary anymore as Fleury’s movement tends to indicate that he really is the author of the weird comments posted at PZ’s and certainly the message PZ published.

I don’t understand why providing the IP and (already public) e-mail of someone could be threatening for his privacy. Wikipedia, including the French section, should be covered by complaints (maybe they are and they don’t give a shit about them).

Anyway, this is not the subject of this blog, just an accident, so I’ll resume with the critic of Fleury’s paper ASAP.

L2/R2

The second anniversary of my request for help to position the four vortices Fleury claims is rapidly approaching and I was looking around for something relevant to make a celebration poster.

I opened The Mechanisms Underlying Primitive Streak Formation in the Chick Embryo, by Manli Chuai and Cornelis J. Weijer¹ for inspiration and of course Fleury’s webpage with his english short presentation.

pharyngulitis

Is the surge of affluence due to the mention of ones blog even at the comments of Pharyngula.

Welcome guys.

Feel comfortable but be afraid, I’m the one manipulating the Master!
Using noodly appendages of course.

pre-cteappv Oops 090713

This is a pre-cteappv Oops and I start wondering how Fleury manage to find journals with so poor review process as to let go to press such mistakes.

This one is from An Elasto-Plastic Model of Avian Gastrulation, Vincent Fleury, Organogenesis 2:1, 6-16, 2005.

4 The paleontological point of view

There is not as much paleontology as one would expect by the title of the chapter. Mostly paleontology is an excuse to further discuss developmental biology, except for subsection 4.1

4.1 Tetrapod origin

If we turn to paleontology, we find a description of tetrapods appearance into three main steps. Appearance of chordates, segmentation of lateral fins, appearance of tetrapods.

That’s the shortest version one can get except “pouf they appeared”. Interesting nevertheless the second step, the “segmentation of lateral fins“. This is one of three hypothetical, not exclusive, working models. Not to be used as a granted fact (see below).

Good news, bad news.

Good news are that Fleury abandonned the idea it appeared in one of his conferences announcement, and promoted in fora, that the tetrapods may have appeared suddenly, with all there attributes, specifying suddenly as “in a single generation“.

But he still think that:

These early tetrapods have well formed complex limbs apparently almost “right away”.

Almost right away being an estimate of the time-lapse between Haikouichthys ercaicunensis, presenting a single median fin-fold and tail, to the tetrapodomorph Tiktaalik roseae; almost right-away corresponds to 100 millions years. At least we are not anymore at the “single generation“level.

Progressive modifications are problematic for a model which is based on a suddenly appearing bauplan.

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