Tangled Bank #98

 
The latest issue of Tangled Bank is #98. It's hosted by Steve Matheson at Quintessence of Dust [Tangled Bank #98].

Hey! Welcome to Tangled Bank #98, and thanks for stopping by. If you've never been to Quintessence of Dust, the lobby is below and to the right. I hope you'll poke around a little.

PZ didn't give me a budget for refreshments, but if you come to the house I'll make sure we at least have plenty of guacamole. Chips are here, and beer is over there. Our city was once used by Anne Lamott as a metaphor for plainness, but it's much cooler than most people think. You can get to our house on a nice bus system, and after the carnival we can pick one of two Ethiopian restaurants. My day job is at Calvin College, but right now I'm on sabbatical in the lab of a friend and collaborator at the Van Andel Institute in downtown Grand Rapids.

---

If you want to submit an article to Tangled Bank send an email message to host@tangledbank.net. Be sure to include the words "Tangled Bank" in the subject line. Remember that this carnival only accepts one submission per week from each blogger. For some of you that's going to be a serious problem. You have to pick your best article on biology.

Evolution as Tinkering

François Jacob won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on the lac operon. He is also known for his thoughts on evolution, especially the concept of a tinkerer. The idea deserves to be better known so I present a long quotation from his little book The possible and the Actual published in 1994. The book contains a lecture that was based on an article he published in Science back in 1977 (Jacob, 1977).

I'm a big fan of this view of evolution [Evolution by Accident].

The action of natural selection has often been compared to that of an engineer. This comparison, however, does not seem suitable. First, in contrast to what occurs during evolution, the engineer works according to a preconceived plan. Second, an engineer who prepares a new structure does not necessarily work from older ones. he electric bulb does not derive from the candle, nor does the jet engine descend from the internal combustion engine. To produce something new, the engineer has at his disposal original blueprints drawn for that particular occasion, materials and machines specially prepared for that task. Finally, the objects thus produced de novo by the engineer, at least by a good engineer, reach the level of perfection made possible by the technology of the time.

In contrast, evolution is far from perfection, as was repeatedly stressed by Darwin, who had to fight against the argument from perfect creation. In the Origin of Species, Darwin emphasizes over and over again the structural and functional imperfections in the world. He always points out the oddities, the strange solutions that a reasonable God would never have used.

In contrast to the engineer, evolution does not produce innovations from scratch. It works on what already exists, either transforming a system to give it a new function or combining several systems to produce a more complex one. Natural selection has no analogy with any aspect of human behavior. If one wanted to use a comparison, however, one would have to say that this process resembles not engineering but tinkering, bricolage we say in French.

While the engineer's work relies on his having the raw materials and the tools that exactly fit his project, the tinkerer manages with odds and ends. Often without even knowing what he is going to produce, he uses whatever he finds around him, old cardboards, pieces of string, fragments of wood or metal, to make some kind of workable object. As pointed out by Claude Levi-Strauss, none of the materials at the tinkerer's disposal has a precise and definite function. Each can be used in several different ways. What the tinkerer ultimately produces is often related to no special project. It merely results from a series of contingent events, from all the opportunities he has to enrich his stock with leftovers. In contrast with the engineer's tools, those of the tinkerer cannot be defined by a a project. What can be said about an of these objects is that "it could be of some use." For what? That depends on the circumstances.

In some respects, the evolutionary derivation of living organisms resembles this mode of operation. In many instances, and without any well-defined long-term project, the tinkerer picks up an object which happens to be in his stock and gives it an unexpected function. Out of an old car wheel, he will make a fan; from a broken table, a parasol. This process is not very different from what evolution performs when it turns a leg into a wing, or a part of a jaw into pieces of ear.

...

When different engineers tackle the same problem, they are likely to end up with very nearly the same solution: all cars look alike, as do all cameras and all fountain pens. In contrast, different tinkerers interested in the same problem will reach different solutions, depending on the opportunities available to each of them. This variety of solutions also applies to the products of evolution, as is shown, for instance, by the diversity of eyes found throughout the living world. The possession of light receptors confers a great advantage under a variety of conditions. During evolution, many types of eyes appeared, based on at least three different principles: the lens, the pinhole, and multiple holes. The most sophisticated ones, like ours, are lens-based eyes, which provide information not only on the intensity of incoming light but also on the objects that light comes from, on their shape, color, position, motion, speed, distance, and so forth. Such sophisticated structures are necessarily complex.

One might suppose, therefore, that there is just one way of producing such a structure. But this is not the case. Eyes with lenses have appeared in molluscs and in vertebrates. Nothing looks so much like our eye as the octopus eye. Yet it did not evolve the same way. In vertebrates, the photoreceptor cells of the retina point away from the light while in molluscs they point toward the light. Among the many solutions found to the problem of photoreceptors, these two are similar but not identical. In each case, natural selection did what it could with the materials at its disposal.

For a more up-to-date view of the evolution of eyes see PZ Myers' article in the current (January/February 2008) issue of SEED magazine.

---

Jacob, F. (1977) Evolution and Tinkering. Science 196:1161-1166. ]JSTOR]

Jacob, F. (1994) from The Possible and the Actual, reprinted in Evolution Extended, Connie Barlow ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (USA) 1994.

The Streisand effect

 
This is a new term to me. It was used over on simra.net in reference to the attempt by students at Wilfred Laurier University to dictate to the Laurier Freethought Alliance [Follow-up on the WLU controversy]. I had to look up the term on Wikipedia.

Just in case there are any other old people out there, here's the definition.

The "Streisand effect" is a term used to describe a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove (in particular, by the means of cease-and-desist letters) a certain piece of information (for example, a photograph, a file, or even a whole website) backfires. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks in a short period of time.[1][2] Mike Masnick said he jokingly coined the term in January 2005, “to describe [this] increasingly common phenomenon.”[3] The effect is related to John Gilmore's observation that, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

The term Streisand effect originally referred to a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photo of her house removed from the publicly available collection of twelve thousand California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns.[4][5][1] Adelman claims he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project.[6] Paul Rogers of the San Jose Mercury News later noted that the picture of Streisand’s house was popular on the Internet.

---

The Quacks Fight Back

 
Last week David Colquhuon gave a talk sponsored by the Centre for Inquiry and the University of Toronto Secular Alliance [Quackery in Academia] [Science in an Age of Endarkenment].

During his visit to Toronto he was interviewed by Michael Enright of the CBC Radio show The Sunday Edition. The interview was broadcast on Sunday, January 27th. As you might imagine, there were lots of comments and emails and a second show was required in order to restore some "balance." The second show was broadcast on Sunday, February 3rd [The Sunday Edition].

A stirred-up hornet's nest is a mild disturbance compared to the firestorm we unleashed last week over my conversation with Dr. David Colquhoun. Dr. Colquhuon is a gangly, pipe-puffing British pharmacologist who thinks all alternative medicine, all of it, is a fraud perpetrated by quacks. But he went further, somehow suggesting that those who believe in it probably supported Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the Ayatollah Khomeini. He pooh-poohed acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, even vitamins.

Well, his remarks opened the floodgates of listener mail, screaming for Dr. Colquhoun's head on a pike. In a few moments, alternative or complimentary medicine strikes back. With the help of two experts, we will try to give the other side of contentious Colquhounism.

Two quacks were required to restore the rift in the space-time continuum caused by too much rationality: Dugald Seely of the Canadian College of Natrupathic Medicine and Dr. Kien Trinh of the DeGroote School of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton. It's shocking that one of them is from a genuine medical school: he's in a Ph.D. program.

You can listen to the podcast on the CBC website but I can assure you that you won't learn anything new. There's some important issues here. Here's one of the letters that was read on the show ...

Most proponents of alternative medicine do not deny the place of Western medicine. It is too bad that for some the respect is not reciprocal.
                                 Dale Jack

The logic here is that just because some quacks are able to recognize the value of evidence-based medicine then it follows that scientists should extend the same respect to quacks who promote non-evidence-based medicine.

It's a mark of how silly our society has become that such an argument even merits a response. It would be like saying that the most outlandish ideas deserve equal time as long as their proponents are respectful to the proponents of reality.

Here's a similar comment ...

He [Colquhoun] is the very representative of the darkness of the scientific method. He is one of the very ilk that would have driven the new hand-washing surgeons to suicide. As a past-President of the Complementary and Integrative Physicians of B.C., I do hope you will spend the next few weeks in contrition—to re-establish your usually balanced and worthwhile reputation.
                                 Steven Faulkner

Coming from a quack, I guess we shouldn't be surprised at the "logic" exhibited here. The first example is the old saw about truly brilliant innovators who were originally scoffed at. The idea is that because one person took on the scientific establishment and won, it follows logically that all renegades must be right. Conversely, scientists who scoff at quacks must be wrong.

No, this does not compute. As they say, people laughed at Galileo but they also laughed at Bozo the clown.

The second example of silly logic is the concept of "fairness" and "balance" that is used time and time again by quacks and IDiots. Apparently it doesn't matter how stupid your ideas are, society demands that you be given a hearing if you are attacked. Well I've got news for all you quacks out there. You don't get to promote your crazy ideas just because you have them. There's no rule that says you have to be given a platform on public radio just because you've been criticized.

If you want to be heard go the Hyde Park on a Sunday morning. Take a soapbox.

---

SciBarCamp

 
I'm blatantly copying this from the SciBarCamp Website. I'll be there. There are still places available and scientists are especially encouraged to register.

SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a weekend of talks and discussions. It will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on the weekend of March 15-16, with an opening reception on the evening of March 14. The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture. The themes are:

• The edge of science (eg, synthetic biology, quantum gravity, cognitive science)
• The edge of technology (eg, mobile web, ambient computing, nanotechnology, web 2.0)
• Science 2.0 (open access, changing models of publication and collaboration, scientific software)
• Scientific literacy and public engagement (eg, one laptop per child project, policy and science, technology as legislation, enfranchising the poor, the young, the old)
• The interactions of science, art and culture: Scientists and artists as partners in the continuing evolution of the culture.

In the tradition of BarCamps, otherwise known as "unconferences", (see BarCamp.org for more information), the program is decided by the participants at the beginning of the meeting, in the opening reception. Presentations and discussion topics can be proposed here or on the opening night. SciBarCamp will require active participation; while not everybody will present or lead a discussion, everybody will be expected to contribute substantially - this will help make it a really creative event.

The talks will be informal and interactive; to encourage this, speakers who wish to give PowerPoint presentations will have ten minutes to present, while those without will have twenty minutes. Around half of the time will be dedicated to small group discussions on topics suggested by the participants. The social events and meals will make it easy to meet people from different fields and industries. Our venue, Hart House, is a congenial space with plenty of informal areas to work or talk, and there will be free wireless access throughout.

Our goals are:

• Igniting new projects, collaborations, business opportunities, and further events.
• Intellectual stimulation and good conversation.
• Integrating science into Toronto's cultural, entrepreneurial, and intellectual activities.
• Prototyping a model that can be easily duplicated elsewhere.

Attendance is free, but there is only space for around 100 people, so please register by sending an email to Jen Dodd (dodd.jen@gmail.com) with your name and contact details. Please include a link to your blog or your organization's webpage that we can display with your name on the participants list at www.SciBarCamp.org.

Eva Amsen is one of the organizers. Read what she has to say on easternblot [SciBarCamp].

---

Stuart Kauffman: Reinventing the Sacred

 
The Centre for Inquiry in Toronto is sponsoring a talk by Stuart Kauffman this Friday evening.

REINVENTING THE SACRED:
How the Paradigm of Emergence Offers New Scientific Views on the Origin of Life and Biodiversity, Economics, Ethics, and Spirituality

Stuart Kauffman, Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics, University of Calgary

Thurs, Feb 8, 7:30pm, Centre for Inquiry Ontario, 216 Beverley St, downtown Toronto.

Part of our ongoing Voices of Reason lecture series - Centre for Inquiry.

The event is open to the public.
Cost: $7 general, $4 students, FREE for Friends of the Centre

A catered reception at 6pm at the Centre for Inquiry Ontario will be held with Dr. Kauffman exclusively for Friends of the Centre so join today by contacting us at ontario@centerforinquiry.net!

Check out Kauffman's bio on The Edge [Stuart Kauffman].

Kauffman's ideas are difficult to understand; although, in fairness, I haven't tried very hard. To me they seem fuzzy and ill-defined with more than a hint of spiritualism in spite of the fact that Kauffman is a non-believer.

Here's an example from an interview with the University of Calgary campus newspaper.

It turns out that the behaviour of genetic networks depends critically on the level at which the genes are connected. If they are heavily connected the system is chaotic, and if they are only lightly connected the system is ordered. An attractive hypothesis is that biological systems, like genetic networks, flourish in a “transition zone” between the ordered and chaotic regimes. I call this transitional phase the complex regime. So biocomplexity refers to biological systems that thrive in this balance between order and chaos. Other examples include the immune and neural systems.

The essence of Kauffman's idea, as I understand it, is that life has a built-in tendency for self-organization. He argues that if you replay the tape of life, very similar sorts of organisms will arise because the ones we see are highly constrained by the basic laws of chemistry and physics operating on our planet. In other words, evolving life doesn't have as many choices or options as we imagine.

Daniel Dennett explains it well in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (p. 225).

It is the non-optionality of these "choices" that Kauffman wants to stress, and so he and his colleague Brian Goodwin (e.g., 1986) are particularly eager to discredit the powerful image, first made popular by the great French biologists Jacques Monod and François Jacob, of Mother Nature as a "tinker," engaging in the sort of tinkering the French call bricolage. The term was first made salient by the anthropologist Claude Lévi Struss (1966). A tinker or bricoleur is an opportunistic maker of gadgets, a "satisficer" (Simon 1957) who is always ready to settle for mediocrity if it is cheap enough. A tinker is not a deep thinker. The two elements of classical Darwinism that Monod and Jacob concentrate on are chance on the one hand and, on the other, the utter directionlessness and myopia (or indeed blindness) of the watchmaker. But, says Kauffman, "Evolution is not just 'chance caught on the wing.' It is not just a tinkering of the ad hoc, of bricolage, of contraption. It is emergent order honored and honed by selection." (Kauffman 1993, p. 644).

---

[Photo Credit: University of Calgary: OnCampus Weekly]

Things Get Complicated at Wilfred Laurier University

 
Some of you will recall the issue. The Laurier Freethought Alliance applied for club status at Wilfred Laurier University but they were turned down by the Campus Clubs Office [Bigots at Wilfrid Laurier University]. In case you've forgotten the reason, here's what the Campus Clubs Office said in rejecting the application.

While the Campus Clubs department understands the goals and visions of your organization, they are not compatible with the guidelines of what may be approved and incorporated into our department. While the promotion of reason, science and freedom of inquiry are perfectly legitimate goals, what is most in question in regards to your club's vision is the promotion of "a fulfilling life without religion and superstition". While this university is indeed technically a secular institution, secular does not denote taking an active stance in opposition to the principles and status of religious beliefs and practices. To be clear, this is not meant to say that the promotion of science and reason are illegitimate goals. But due to the need to respect and tolerate the views of others, the Campus Clubs department is unable to approve a club of this nature at this time. If you wish to adjust and rethink your club's application and vision, you may resubmit a revised proposal at any time.

This is political correctness taken to absurd lengths. I very much doubt that the same criteria are applied to religious clubs at Wilfred University.

Can you imagine a Christian club being denied status because they promote, "a fulfilling life by following the teachings of Jesus Christ"? The Laurier Freethought Alliance is promoting the idea that you have have a fulfulling life without Jesus of any other God. What's wrong with that?

Anyway, the response of the atheist community took the Campus Clubs Office by surprise and they are now stuggling to cover their asses rear ends. You can read the response on Anatoly Venovcev's blog [Eye of the Hurricane].

Anatoly wants everyone to calm down and stop pointing out the obvious to the powers that be at Wilfred Laurier. The Laurier Freethought Alliance wants to negotiate a way out of this problem and the publicity isn't helping right now.

That's a bit naive. The cat is out of the bag. Now is the time for the Laurier Freethought Alliance to stand firm and not bow to pressure from the Campus Clubs to change their true mission.

---

[Hat Tip: The Frame Problem]

Monday's Molecule #61

 
Today's molecule is three molecules. You have to identify the purple molecule on the left and the blue one near the top. You also have to identify the multicolored double-stranded helically thing that's holding them all together. (Hint: it's DNA.) The electron micrographs at the top serve as additional hints.

You have to give me the common names of these molecules and explain what's going on in the figure. You'll be pleased to know that I don't need the systematic IUPAC name for this one. This should be as easy as falling off a log for every biochemistry and molecular biology student but I fear that it may fall into the category of things that have been forgotten in modern courses.

There's an indirect connection between this molecule and Wednesday's Nobel Laureate(s). Your task is to figure out the significance of today's molecule and identify the Nobel Laureate(s) who worked with it. Here's an additional hint for this week only; I'm looking for a single name and if you can't decide between two or more possibilities, choose the earliest winner. (Be sure to check previous Laureates.)

The reward goes to the person who correctly identifies the molecule and the Nobel Laureate(s). Previous winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first collected the prize. There are three ineligible candidates for this week's reward. The prize is a free lunch at the Faculty Club.

THEME:

Nobel Laureates
Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk(at)bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly identifies the molecule and the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Laureates so you might want to check the list of previous Sandwalk postings.

Correct responses will be posted tomorrow along with the time that the message was received on my server. I may select multiple winners if several people get it right.

Comments will be blocked for 24 hours. Comments are no open.

UPDATE: No winner this week. There were (only) three people who got the molecule correct. Only one of them was close to getting the Nobel Laureate (singular). That person named him correctly (François Jacob) but he threw in a second Nobel Laureate who had already been featured on Sandwalk.

The molecule is lac repressor bound to two sites on DNA forming a loop. The loop contains the binding site for cyclic AMP regulatory (receptor) protein or CRP, also known as catabolite activator protein (CAP). That's the other protein in the figure. The figure is from Lac Repressor and Operator.

---

Protest for Improving Science Education

 
John Pieret makes a very good point on his blog Thoughts in a Haystack. He points out that many American high school teachers avoid teaching evolution in their classes because it's too controversial. They'll skip that section of the curriculum even if it's required by the school board. "Who needs the hassle from parents," they say.

This fact needs to be widely known. It means the IDiots are winning in spite of the court cases that go against them. (John will probably disagree with this point.) If evolution is being removed from classrooms—and all the evidence suggests that it is—then we're fooling ourselves if we think the good guys are winning.

Stand up and protest if you think this is happening in your school district [Sounds of Silence]. Even better, encourage our students to take to the streets. You'd be surprised at how many of them want a decent education.

---

[Photo Credit: "Joining nationwide demonstrations, high-school students in Valparaíso [Chile] take to the streets on May 30 [2006] to protest [for] proposed changes in Chile's public education system." Eliseo Fernandez—Reuters /Landov (Encyclopedia Britanica Online)]

Ann Coulter Praises Canada for Sending Toops to Vietnam

 
That's right. You read the title correctly. Watch the video where she's challenged about her lack of truthiness. It's hilarious.

---

[Hat Tip: Canadian Cynic]

How to Think About Science

 
One of my colleagues send me a link to a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio series about How to Think About Science. You can download podcasts of all 10 episodes.

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?

Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.

A "new field of study"? I didn't know that.

I recognize the names of some of the people who were interviewed and I'm more than a little skeptical. What do you think? Are these the leading lights of a new way of looking at epistemology? Or, is this just a subtle version of new-age psychobabble?

Episode 1 - November 14 - Simon Schaffer
Episode 2 - November 21 - Lorraine Daston
Episode 3 - November 28 - Margaret Lock
Episode 4 - December 5 - Ian Hacking and Andrew Pickering
Episode 5 - December 12 - Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour
Episode 6 - January 2 - James Lovelock
Episode 7 - January 9 - Arthur Zajonc
Episode 8 - January 16 - Wendell Berry
Episode 9 - January 23 - Rupert Sheldrake
Episode 10 - January 30 - Brian Wynne

---

Bowls: Super and Otherwise

 
PZ Myers makes a silly comment ...

I have heard a rumor that tomorrow there will be some strange game called the "superbowl" going on … I don't know who is playing, I won't be watching, and I really don't care who wins, so I think I'll just root for the Toronto Maple Leafs, if that's all right.

Silly PZ. The Toronto Maple Leafs aren't playing today (Thank God). Bowls is an individual sport not one that's played by teams. Furthermore, it has to be played outside in warm weather. That's why the Bowls Championship game is in Mexico, or Arizona, or wherever it is.

---

Blogroll: How Popular Is Your Blog?

 
According to Coturnix, and others, this weekend is the annual Blogroll Amnesty Day. The idea is to update your blogroll by adding blogs that have less traffic than your own blog.

I decided it would be a good time to update my blogroll but most of the blogs I added are more popular than Sandwalk. I'm adding them in the hopes that they will notice me and add Sandwalk to their own blogroll on Blogroll Amnesty Day. You can see my complete blogroll in the left-hand sidebar. I've moved it up for a few days.

Many of the blogs listed below should have been on my blogroll a year ago but I was just too lazy to add them. I read all of these blogs every day, that's one of the criteria. The others are that the blog has frequent postings and the articles are worth reading. In some cases the postings are less frequent than normal but the bloggers are friends, colleagues, relatives, or enemies (or some combination).

I'm very curious about the popularity of blogs. Here are the latest numbers for Sandwalk.

I think the standard measure of popularity is the number of Views per day or the number of Views per month. In January Sandwalk had 47,578 visits and 75,511 views. I think this is about average for the blogs on my blogroll but I really don't know. How about posting your numbers in the comments—if you want to reveal them? (Views per day, and total views in January.)

People also talk about the "Authority" ranking on Technorati. Sandwalk's is 273, whatever that means. What is the "Authority" ranking of your blog? Does anyone know if Pharyngula has authority? What about The Panda's Thumb?

Here are the new blogs I just added today. Read them. Now. They are all very interesting. My apologies to those who should have been there a long time ago.

Bayblab
beer with chocolate
Botany Photo of the Day
Canadian Cynic
Catalogue of Organisms
Eye on DNA
Effect Measure
Framing Science
Genetics & Health
Greg Laden's Blog
Helmintholog
Genomicron
Laelaps
Memoirs of a Skepchick
Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant
Recursiity
Respectful Insolence
Runesmith's Canadian Content"
The Evilutionary Biologist
The Lippard Blog
The Loom
The Frame Problem
The Unexamined Life
Thoughts in a Haystack

---

Our Groundhog Is Better than Your Groundhog!

 

Wiarton Willie didn't see his shadow so Spring is coming.

See the video.

---

How to Describe People Who Reject Evolution

 
The following sentences are taken from performance reviews that were originally published in various places. They have often been brought together in a single email message that attributes all of them to the Canadian Federal government, the American Federal government, a large American corporation, the American military, etc. etc. I'm assuming that the site from the Kellogg School of management has the attributions correct [Sales Humor].

I may have to use some of them, since "IDiot" is losing its effectiveness.

These quotes were taken from real resumes, cover letters and Performance Reviews. Most were printed in the July 21, 1997, issue of Fortune Magazine.

These quotes are taken from actual performance evaluations.

1. "Since my last report, this employee has reached rock bottom and has started to dig."
2. "His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity."
3. "I would not allow this employee to breed."
4. "This associate is really not so much of a has-been, but more of a definitely won't be."
5. "Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap."
6. "When she opens her mouth, it seems that this is only to change whichever foot was previously in there."
7. "He would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle."
8. "This young lady has delusions of adequacy."
9. "He sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them."
10. "This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot."
11. "This employee should go far-and the sooner he starts, the better."
12. He certainly takes a long time to make his pointless.
13. He doesn't have ulcers, but he's a carrier.
14. He's been working with glue too much.
15. He would argue with a signpost.
16. He brings a lot of joy whenever he leaves the room.
17. When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell.
18. If you see 2 people talking and one looks bored, he's the other one.

These are actual lines from military performance appraisals or OERS(Officer Efficiency Reports).

1. "Not the sharpest knife in the drawer."
2. "Got into the gene pool while the lifeguard wasn't watching."
3. "A room temperature IQ."
4. "Got a full 6-pack, but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together."
5. "A gross ignoramus -- 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus."
6. "A photographic memory but with the lens cover glued on."
7. "A prime candidate for natural deselection."
8. "Bright as Alaska in December."
9. "One-celled organisms out score him in IQ tests."
10. "Donated his body to science before he was done using it."
11. "Fell out of the family tree."
12. "Gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming."
13. "Has two brains; one is lost and the other is out looking for it."
14. "He's so dense, light bends around him."
15. "If brains were taxed, he'd get a rebate."
16. "If he were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered twice a week."
17. "If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you'd get change."
18. "If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean."
19. "It's hard to believe that he beat out 1,000,000 other sperm."
20. "One neuron short of a synapse."
21. "Some drink from the fountain of knowledge; he only gargled."
22. "Takes him 1 1/2 hours to watch 60 Minutes."
23. "Wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead."

These quotes were taken from actual resumes and cover letters.

1. "I demand a salary commiserate with my extensive experience."
2. "I have lurnt Word Perfect 6.0 computor and spreasheet progroms."
3. "Received a plague for Salesperson of the Year."
4. "Wholly responsible for two (2) failed financial institutions."
5. "Reason for leaving last job: maturity leave."
6. "Failed bar exam with relatively high grades."
7. "It's best for employers that I not work with people."
8. "Let's meet, so you can 'ooh' and 'aah' over my experience."
9. "You will want me to be Head Honcho in no time."
10. "Am a perfectionist and rarely if ever forget details."
11. "I was working for my mom until she decided to move."
12. "Marital status: single. Unmarried. Unengaged. Uninvolved. No commitments."
13. "I have an excellent track record, although I am not a horse."
14 "I am loyal to my employer at all costs.... Please feel free to respond to my resume on my office voice mail."
15. "I have become completely paranoid, trusting completely no one and absolutely nothing."
16. "My goal is to be a meteorologist. But since I possess no training in meteorology, I suppose I should try stock brokerage."
17. "I procrastinate, especially when the task is unpleasant."
18. "Personal interests: donating blood. Fourteen gallons so far."
19. "As indicted, I have over five years of analyzing investments."
20. "Instrumental in ruining entire operation for a Midwest chain store."
21. "Note: Please don't misconstrue my 14 jobs as 'job-hopping'. I have never quit a job."
22. "Marital status: often. Children: various."
23. "Reason for leaving last job: They insisted that all employees get to work by 8:45 am every morning. I couldn't work under those conditions."
24. "The company made me a scapegoat, just like my three previous employers."
25. "Finished eighth in my class of ten."
26. "References: none. I've left a path of destruction behind me."

---

[Hat Tip: CWRB, via email.]