An Evolutionary Classification of Genomics Researchers
Dan Graur has a new paper describing various functional categories of DNA. This is supposedly to rectify the scientific errors made by ENCODE, but that could be hard given - “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Change is impossible as long as NHGRI grant managers like Mike Pazin continue to shower money on their ENCODE friends.
Therefore we propose a revised version of the abstract to classify researchers instead of DNA.
The pronouncements of the ENCODE Project Consortium regarding junk DNA exposed the need for an classification of PIs according to their willingness to understand evolution. In the classification scheme presented here, we divide the PIs into functional PI, i.e., PIs who understand evolutionary concepts, and rubbish PI, i.e., PIs who do not. Functional PI is further subdivided into literal PI and indifferent PI. In literal PI, the researcher is further contributing to development of evolutionary theories; in indifferent PI, researcher only uses the concepts in his work. Rubbish PI is further subdivided into junk PI and garbage PI. Junk PI neither enhances nor misuses evolutionary concepts in his paper and, hence, does not pollute the literature. Garbage PI, on the other hand, decreases the quality of its papers. Papers from garbage PI exist in the literature only because the reviewers are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Each of these four PI tags: [] categories can be (1) funded and funded by NHGRI, (2) funded but not by NHGRI, or (3) not funded. The affiliation of a PI to a particular category may change during his career: functional PI may become junk PI, junk PI may become garbage PI, rubbish PI may become functional PI, and so on, however, determining the evolutionary understanding of a PI must be based on its present status rather than on its potential to change (or not to change) in the future. Changes in classification are divided in to pseudoPI, Birney PI, zombie PI, and hide PI.
