I have been wondering what the global-warming-deniers would have made of Watson and Crick and Nature in 1953 if they had known how they acquired Rosalind Franklin’s data; if Watson's outrageously politically incorrect views had been outed in hacked emails; if their Central Dogma had been exposed as strictly not true by the discovery of reverse transcriptase in the full glare of the modern media? As for the magazine, this appears in Nature's Wikipedia entry: “John Maddox, Nature's editor, stated that 'the Watson and Crick’s paper was not peer-reviewed by Nature... the paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident. No referee working in the field ... could have kept his mouth shut once he saw the structure'."

So DNA might have become “nothing but a hoax and scare tactic" as the lobbyists’ blogs put it. Molecular Biology might have been set back or killed off for a generation. But of course this was pure science and didn't threaten global economic interests.
 
 
Yesterday, I published a longish article in the Independent on a new Darwin book: What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. The book is a heavy polemic against the Modern Synthesis or Neo-Darwinism. Their attack is both philosophcial and scientific and urgently required answering. Many biologists feel that the Modern Synthesis badly needs updating to include the welter of data coming from Evo Devo but What Darwin Got Wrong is way off target. 

Inevitably, What Darwin Got Wrong will be heavily blogged. First off was evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. Watch this space.
 
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