A reader sent me this “paper” and asked me if I really wrote it. It is not only garbage, but, in parts, complete gibberish.
I’ll use this space to assert that NO, THIS IS A FAKE. The “Journal of Evolutionary Genetics and Adaptation” does not exist. Googling it yields no results, and asking Grok yields this:
No, there is no journal titled Journal of Evolutionary Genetics and Adaptation (or any close variant like Journal of Evolutionary Genetics).
Searches across academic databases, journal lists, and publishers turn up zero results for a journal by that exact (or near-exact) name. No ISSN, publisher page, or official record exists for it.
There is an American Journal of Science, mentioned as the place I published this garbage, but it is an earth sciences journal devoted to geology. I’ve never published in it.
Although the content below is opaque, it may be an attempt to say I’ve worked on the developmental genetics of skin color in some bizarre species, which may be a guilt-by association thing with racism. Who knows?
At any rate, I’m making this post only to assert, for the record, that what is below is a complete fabrication. It appears to be the product of an addled mind.
Click on the picture if you want to see some lunacy:
This is disturbing. Libel of an outrageously sinister variety. An obvious attempt to smear and destroy the reputation of a researcher.
Addled brain. A search for the “Aldaes algahil” species returns either “Barenaked Ladies” and their song “Alcohol,” or various brands of fruity vodka! And the African oright, according to Google’s AI, “most likely refers to the green beauty brand’s South African presence, a popular pan-African music and dance track, or green travel.”
At least “Jerry Coyne” exists! Sorry you have to deal with this nonsense.
This is definitely AI-generated. I ran the image through Claude and it flagged six separate tells — gibberish body text, the “species” name spelled three different ways, meme-style before/after photos posing as a figure, and so on.
Curious where it originated and how the reader came across it.
Sadly, I have seen this before…LONG before AI was capable of doing these things. There was a clever guy back in the 90s that found a way to create “textbooks” with hyperlinks in them that could connect parts within the books as well as locate external resources. It was a wonderful idea, except for the part of the creator’s total ignorance of the academic fields he was “covering”. In addition, he copied huge swaths of text from published sources (a lot more complicated in the early 90s than today) and inserted them in his “books” but also misinterpreted and distorted a lot of the material and context. Furthermore, he listed the authors of these sources as collaborators or co-authors.
I had been tagged as a potential reviewer, and it seemed to me that the presentation of materials and conclusions attributed to “co-authors and collaborators” contradicted what I knew of their work. So, I reached out and they confirmed never having been consulted or agreeing to be a part of these works. In some cases, the material written by the books’ author was so wrong (and inaccurate) that it could risk professional damage to those whose materials he used. Sadly, what could have been a wonderful ground-breaking approach to interactive textbooks floundered under cease-and-desist orders.
In the age of AI, I am seeing similar things more often popping up in student bibliographies and “summaries” of non-existent articles. It is a little better these days, but in the beginning up to 25% of student papers had more than a few “hallucinated” sources.
What you seem to have here appears more intentional; some stuff probably scraped from websites via AI, but then mixed into a whole array of offensive and unscientific offal. What we teach scientific communication students these days is to VERIFY every single source, even if it seems legitimate, and to locate the item on the publisher’s or journal’s website VIA a legitimate bibliographic search utility, and not a non-specific search engine (Bing, Google, DuckDUckGo, etc).
Sue.