RTFM

RTFM Avoid embarrassment.

What may happen when one is decided to have great theories about a subject he is not familiar with? Except all those irritating rhetorical turns that he produce¹ sometimes there are great comical effects.

I just managed not throwing my mouthful of coffee on my laptop (but I do have to clean the floor):

While preparing this review, I found it impossible to find a description of where the lateral plates come from.

^*This is the perfect occasion to place: RTFM.

What embryology textbooks our physicist have consulted that doesn’t give the origin of the mesoderm and the subdivisions of the mesodermal plate to paraxial, intermediary and lateral? He should give us the name(s) of the book(s) to avoid it(them).

I suspect Fleury really tried hard to find where the lateral plate come from, as he emphasize “impossible“. He didn’t searched in the right place. Maybe he thought that a brilliant physicist have nothing useful to learn in an embryology textbook: wrong.

Let’s see,

1. this guy is to discuss about gastrulation; which result in the formation of the three primary germ layers, ectoderm mesoderm (including the lateral plate) and endoderm and despite his ignorance of the gastrulation he have a theory about the origin of tetrapods which he is clarifying,
2. somehow this blatant example of ignorance wasn’t corrected by the editor or the reviewers of the paper, leading to suspect them to be either as much ignorant as the author² or suspect they haven’t read the paper; quite embarrassing for the journal and his editorial board.

Now, I hope Vincent Fleury is going to drop everything else he is doing right now, go to the library ASAP and get an embryology textbook to read. Read it, learn the definitions to be sure what he is talking about then read his paper for basic corrections.

---

1. Which could be of great interested for people like Brickmont & Sokal as they are Fashionable Nonsense.

2. Not really a problem for physicists to ignore embryology, or for embryologists to ignore some physics.

* Illustration from fruitless Splicing Specifies Male Courtship Behavior in Drosophila, in reference of Jean Staune’s opinion about biology textbooks:

Ce n’est pas en lisant un bouquin de biologie technique traitant de l’enculage des mouches que l’on peut comprendre l’évolution

Well, Staune is wrong, some basic manuals reading would have avoided much embarrassment to Fleury.