Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bios theory

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was trash this article. Mailer Diablo 14:51, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Bios theory

This is a non-notable pseudotheory. As discussed on the talk page, all papers are by the same set of authors. Google returns only 259 hits for "bios theory", and 186 with "bios theory" -wikipedia. However, many of these refer to computer BIOS's, and removing those results has proven somewhat difficult. "bios theory" -wikipedia -computer -linux returns 92 total results with only 19 unique results, but this may be too highly selective. Philosophus ^T 09:33, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

• "Bios theory: little quoted theory" = Delete. Vizjim 10:28, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• delete - non-notable gobbledegook William M. Connolley 10:44, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. Would Wikipedia be better with or without this article? I'm confident that we're better off without. The article uses a lot of terminology from dynamical systems, but in such a way that I, and even more importantly, editors like User:XaosBits whom I consider to be very knowledgeable on this subject, cannot understand them. There has been a lot of discussion about bios theory (see for instance Talk:Chaos theory and its archives), but it has not been possible to come to a clear explanation about what the main concepts (novelty and bios) mean. This makes the whole article unverifiable. I admit that this also makes it hard for me to judge the theory on its merits, and there are some papers published on this theory, but in my opinion these are too few and too new to make the theory notable. The combination of unverifiability (because it is unclear, despite lots of effort) and probably unnotability suffices for me to advocate deletion. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:15, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - Xaosbits is the only one that actually tried to improve the article (at least with very constructive critiques). Most other people just complained without trying to edit Bios theory, and actually tried to disaprove it, which is not the job of wikipedia editors. I don't think that because something is new it should be excluded from Wikipedia. Unclear does not mean unverifiable. Verifiable means that what is in the article can be found in the published papers. I understand that there are mathematicians here who like rigor a lot. However, Bios theory emerged from the social science oriented group, and people there do not use same rigor as do people in mathematics and physics. Bios theory has been published in Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology and the Life Sciences among other journals. I think that it is arrogant to claim that people publishing in these journals are pseudoscientists just because they have different approach to science than hard science researchers. World is not just what we know. Knowledge is not just what we consider knowledge.Lakinekaki 13:20, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. Article is incoherent. Despite lengthly conversations with the page author (Lakinekaki), a meaningful article was never arrived at. To rebut the above commentary: while lack of rigor may be acceptable in the social sciences, this article was making claims about mathematics and about medical science, where rigor is required. What I found particularly disturbing were claims made connecting bios theory to biological sciences, while demonstrating an utter (and willing!) ignorance of prior literature connecting chaos theory and the life sciences. I know damned little about such things, and was displeased to learn I knew more than the author. As to arrogance: this article and its author made the arrogant claim that bios theory was the king and leader of chaos theory, which was all the more galling given the protestations about rigor, clarity and hard science. linas 14:20, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Some users have claimed this to be gobbledegook, however we have at least 7 articles in peer review journals, 1 book published by a respectable publisher (World Scientific). One of the contributors to the theory is L. Kauffman, a notable mathematican who made important contribution to Knot theory (see Kauffman's CV at http://www.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/LKVita.ps to verify that he had indeed contributed to this study). To me this seems like more protoscience than psuedoscience. Sabelli et al are trying to find metrics which can destinguish between the patterns in heart rate and purly chaotic systems. Their concept of novality is one attempt at a metric which does seem to detect some patterns. The article does require a lot of work. --Salix alba (talk) 14:36, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Salix alba, I enjoyed reading Knots And Physics and I am familiar with link polynomials. Unfortunately, it is perfectly possible for the same person to be involved with both very good mathematics (Kauffman's bracket is very good) and very bad science! To take an even more extreme example, Isaac Newton. ---CH 01:53, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

• Speedy Delete - its quite clear the wikipedia community is not prepared to bother to examine the rather interesting statistical technique of comparing shuffled and unshuffeled data. Lets not prolong this anylonger, and perhaphs we could get on with addressing the poor state of many mathematical articles See Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0 for where we could better spend out time. --Salix alba (talk) 16:04, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

It may be interesting, but there's no evidence of the method or of interest in the article. You've had plenty of time to add real material — if there is any. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 16:15, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

• Delete all "little quoted theories" (this gets around 250 ghits). Why delete little quoted theories? For the same reason we deleted Aetherometry: it's not sufficiently widely discussed that we have a decent pool of secondary sources from which to write a neutral and verifiable article. Just zis Guy you know? 15:12, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Weak delete. Google hits are not a litmus test of notability. But it looks like this has been through several sorts of cleanup. A theory about brontosauruses or butterflies or ytterbium is one thing, and I might not presume to judge it nonsense because I did not understand it. A theory about "systems" is another thing entirely, and when its explanation seems to involve strings of abstract Latinate nouns that never seem to touch the ground, I'm much less inclined to be charitable. I have very little tolerance for this kind of writing in business related articles. This reads like the same sort of cruft, and it seems it's been given time to develop into something that reads better, and gone no further than this. Smerdis of Tlön 15:21, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. This seems to be an ill-written article on an ill-defined topic. I get no sense of what "bios" is as something that distinguishes itself from chaos, either as a seperate entity or a well-defined subset of chaos. To me, the lack of mathematicians running to the defense of this article is most telling. If this was an accepted part of chaos theory, they would be here opposing this action. I also am disturbed by the defense of this article by Salix alba is in saying that "Sabelli et al are trying to find ...". Wikipedia is not a research journal, nor is it a crystal ball. Unless it is highly notable, Wikipedia should not be reporting on ongoing academic research. --EMS | Talk 16:36, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. Pseudoscientific gibberish and probable original research. KleenupKrew 20:30, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete This is probably original research, it's also pseudoscience, and it's a "little quoted theory" meaning that it admits it has little notability in the article. Beno1000 21:02, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Abstain but comment -- a significant mathematical discovery, but no publication in mathematical publications? Cited only by a limited set of authors? You have to buy the main author's book to get the CD-ROM with the algorithm? Seems a borderline case, if we count the existing publications on the plus side. Unfortunately the article doesn't describe it's subject very clearly. The article quality should be deciding point. --Pjacobi 22:02, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per many of the contributors above. -- Kicking222 23:39, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Speedy delete as unknown, non-notable, ridiculous piece of randomcrapcruft. M1ss1ontomars2k4 23:42, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
• Strong delete:

1. Results of a literature search and Google by User:XaosBits strongly suggest that "bios theory" (sic) is so obscure that deletion is amply warranted on grounds of non-notability alone,
2. I have listed serious problems with every sentence of the first paragraph alone, showing that the article is not only very misleading (for example claiming for "bios theory" insights which should properly be abscribed to chaos theory), to the extraordinary extent that virtually every caption and every sentence in this article is misleading and/or scientifically dubious; it is relevant to state that like User:XaosBits I am knowledgeable about dynamical systems theory,
3. the author of the article, User:Lakinekaki (aka the ameritech.net anon from Chicago) has concealed from the WP community the fact that in real life he is one Lazar Kovacevic of Chicago (note the listed email handle in the ARIN record for this website, exploreideas.com, which is registered to Kovacevic), who is employed by an organization called Chicago Center for Creative Development (CCCD), whose website is registered to one Linnea Carlson-Sabelli of Chicago, and which promotes the ideas of Hector Sabelli, who is described in the article as the author of "bios theory"; Kovacevic has further failed to disclose that he is a coworker of Hector Sabelli and a coauthor with L. Carlson-Sabelli and H. Sabelli of the first paper he cites (apparently very obscure), so that this article violates WP:VAIN,
4. Kovacevic may have also concealed a hidden agenda of his employer which has nothing to do with science; for example this file from the CCCD website claims "Biotic development illustrates how evolution may be expected to continue creating an attractor of infinite complexity rather than tending to equilibrium. This provides a mathematical metaphor for God compatible with contemporary science and with mental health principles." The appeal to the technical terms attractor, infinite, complexity, equilibrium (from dynamical systems theory), and of course the alleged "mathematical metaphor" are all extremely dubious.

All in all, this is one of the most disturbing examples of deceptive promotion of a very obscure crank theory which I have yet encountered in the Wikipedia. This article should be deleted without delay.---CH 01:39, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

• Delete: too many problems, as listed in the Bios theory talk page.  — XaosBits 03:46, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete original research and dishonest to boot. In addition to CH's arguments, I was extremely surprised to see this article cite the well-known Chirikov (et al) for the statement "Bios is generated mathematically by feedback processes". A searchable version of the paper is here; note how it says nothing about "bios". Melchoir 04:13, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

  I apologize for this. My mistake. I wrote this from my head and have wrongly interpreted what I read. The right quotation from the Bios book is: Biotic patterns are also generated by a number of nonlinear equations described by Chirikov4 and others, and investigated as a model for deterministic diffusion without remarking on a new pattern distinct from chaos, or on the concept of biotic feedback.[1]Lakinekaki

• Delete Little quoted, little known theory. Details which would be notable either make no sense or are not accurate. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 06:12, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per Arthur Rubin and WP:NOR. Stifle (talk) 15:43, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete : OR. - GWO

Hello! I just discovered error in the isometry (novelty) definition. Maybe that's why the article didn't make sense to you! Please read it here User:Lakinekaki/Bios_theory#Isometry_recurrence and tell me if it makes any difference for you in understanding the article.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Lakinekaki (talk • contribs)

I think that the idea that this page contains errors that noone else can notice only further makes the case that it is trivial if not OR. --EMS | Talk 20:48, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

People did notice it. Definition didn't make sense to anyone, I just don't know how I didn't see it earlier!Lakinekaki 21:16, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

On his user talk page, Lazar Kovacevic now admits his real life identity . Lazar has had a great deal of time to improve this article but despite long outstanding serious objections has made little improvement, and now he wants to ask for more time since he just discovered an error in the definition of the only bit (as he admits) where "bios theory" can claim some novelty, the so-called "novelty" (and even this is not so novel; I could give much earlier citations of similar notions). Wikipedia users should not write articles on very obscure theories to which they have contributed and then try to "correct" their own paper after other WP users point out serious defects! Lazar, please see again WP:NOR, WP:RS, WP:VAIN.---CH 04:55, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

What does it mean On his user talk page, Lazar Kovacevic now admits his real life identity . Look at histories of my user page and user talk page, and you'll see for how long are those comments and links there. Your detective work surprised me since there is the first link on my userpage that speaks for itself. It guides to complexity paper where my name stands next to bios paper, and my email is [email protected]. It gives the whole thing:

Quantum bios and biotic complexity in the distribution of galaxies Hector Sabelli, Lazar Kovacevic * Chicago Center for Creative Development, Chicago, Illinois 60614; email: Lazar Kovacevic ([email protected]) *Correspondence to Lazar Kovacevic, Chicago Center for Creative Development, 2400 Lakeview Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614

If I ever had secret agenda or intention do deceive, would I ever put this link on my user page. I don't understand why you did detective work, when I made things so obvious. Lakinekaki 18:25, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

You can accuse me for WP:VAIN, but the only reason I put one reference with my name is because there were 5 other names in that reference, and some editors wanted to see that there were more people involved in bios, and not just Sabelli. Lakinekaki 18:30, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

• Delete, immediately - with extreme prejudice I have no specialist knowledge of chaos theory and was using wikipaedia as a first resource. I have just spent one hour following the debate about this article. Why has it not already been deleted? Its continued existence brings wikipedia's reputation into decline. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.6.139.11 (talk • contribs) 12:43, May 16, 2006

  Kindly be advised that a global open content encyclopedia like this must (as things now stand) be taken with a grain of salt. It should be used as a way to get a sense of the subject, and as a resource for other resources. As for deleting this article: There is a process involved with it, which is working. It will take several more days before enough time will have elpased and the admins will rules on this request. This page will then be removed (as there is a consensus to do so). However, each AfD action needs to be ruled on individually, as there have been cases of deletion being requested for individual articles. (Note however that if this page reappears quickly that it can be speedily re-deleted.) --EMS | Talk 19:06, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.