A Friend's Loss and an Adversary's Viciousness

Wes Elsberry has already posted about this on his blog, but our friend and fellow Panda's Thumb contributor Mark Perakh has suffered a terrible tragedy: his house has burned down, taking with it virtually everything. The good news is that he and his wife are safe, but he has lost what is in essence the work of a lifetime that has now lasted 81 years. Mark is an extraordinary man who has lived a life few of us could imagine. He grew up in the Soviet Union, where he was imprisoned in the gulag under Kruschev. He managed to escape and make his way to America, where he became a physics professor in California.

Mark has published nearly 300 papers, beginning in 1949 in Russia, as well as several books. He also holds several patents. This record has come under ridiculous and unwarranted attack by none other than our old pal DaveScot for the great sin of having criticized his hero, Mr. Dembski. This goes back a ways, but it's worth posting because A) it demonstrates just how vicious these folks can get without any regard for accuracy and B) DaveScot has been repeating the same charges recently, again without regard for accuracy. It began when Mark published an article critical of Dembski's work in Skeptic last year, prompting this non-responsive sneer from Dembski: DaveScot immediately jumped on this as an excuse to slander Perakh:

Link to google scholar

It appears that Perakh has published nothing in his area of expertise (physics and materials science). A rather dismal record for a professor emeritus of physics.

Link to patent office

He is one of five named inventors on a single patent granted in 1980. Woo-woo!

Mark appears to be your usual outspoken Darwinist - a nobody that's done nothing notable in his field of expertise vainly trying to make a mark outside their field of expertise. Fits right in with poseurs Wesley Elsberry, Ed Darrel, Nick Matzke, Ed Brayton, Eugenie Scott, et al.

But hey, he got a special doctoral degree in the Soviet Union that's greater than any doctoral degree you can get in the United States. With Russian physics PhD's like Mark it's no wonder the Soviet Union lost the cold war.

Typical DaveScot - simultaneously insulting, juvenile and most importantly, completely wrong. In fact, a search of just a single database (ISI) revealed 111 publications from Perakh and even that was nowhere near a complete list because dozens of publications from the 1950s and 60s in the Soviet Union were not included in the database. A search of the patent database, again leaving out many of his inventions in the Soviet Union, in fact revealed multiple patents, contrary to Dave's claims. The problem was not that Mark hadn't really done all the work he claimed, the problem was that DaveScot doesn't know how to search scientific publication databases.

Mark replied to this slander both on Panda's Thumb and TalkReason, a website he owns, and informed Dave that he simply had his facts wrong because he didn't know that he had changed his last name after he left the Soviet Union, from Popereka to Perakh, and because he was searching the wrong databases. Even after being shown the list of patents and being informed of the right databases and names to check that would prove him wrong, did Dave retract his scurrilous claims? Nope. He did post this one comment admitting that one part of what he said was wrong, wrapped in further insults:

Correction:

Link to google scholar

Mark did publish a few things back in the 1970's in his area of expertise. My initial search missed it. His useful output in material science came to a screeching halt 30 years ago with one lone exception in 1985. Mark's doctoral degree dates back to 1949 and his only significant outburst of useful work was in the 1970's. It appears he was out to lunch the rest of his life and now in his dotage he's diddling with NeoDarwinism. Maybe he's operating under the theory "if at first you don't succeed, try try again".

That was in August. More recently, in a comment on his post attacking me as a hypocrite, he saw fit to post another vicious attack on Mark - as though he hadn't already falsely slandered him enough:

Mark Perakh is a crazy Russian physicist known to say all sorts of crazy things. Russians are notoriously paranoid conspiracy theorists and bald faced liars. My favorite example was when I questioned his credentials and his response was essentially "the communists took my papers". Evidently Mark doesn't know the classic American excuse "my dog ate my homework". I had a field day with that one.

In this case, it would again appear that Mark's proof disappeared in an unfortunate circumstance beyond his control. A mysterious software glitch in Amazon Canada magically and momentarily revealed the name "William Dembski" behind an anonymous reviewer"s handle. Wow! What're the odds? At any rate Mark's "the Canadian software ate my proof" is par for the course for this guy.

The short answer is Perakh, like a million other lunatics, doesn't deserve a response to his paranoid accusations.

Just a vile and, again, totally inaccurate attack. The "field day" that he claims to have had with Mark's publication record appears to be completely delusional. Mark did not reply by just saying "the communists took my papers", he responded by showing the real record of his publication. DaveScot was wrong in August, he's wrong now, and even after being proven wrong he continues to insult and impugn the integrity of an 81 year old man who has endured and achieved infinitely more than he has during his lifetime. The fact that he does so even after having been proven wrong in his factual claims for those attacks demonstrates just how despicable a human being he is.

By the way, his claims about Perakh being "paranoid" about Dembski having written an "anonymous" review are way off the mark as well. Here's the original post with the evidence that Dembski did in fact do this, judge for yourself. He's never denied it. Everyone knows he did it, and everyone knows how pathetic it is. Everyone, that is, except DaveScot and the rest of Dembski's sycophants, who clearly care not a bit about truth or accuracy as long as they score a few points with their hero.

Mark Perakh is a brilliant and accomplished man who has endured and achieved more in his 81 years than most of us could even dream of. The fact that a cretin like DaveScot would attack him in such vicious terms even after the factual basis for his attacks have been proven wrong only shows how dishonest and morally bankrupt the man is.

Please keep Mark and his wife in your thoughts, as he is in all of ours. Now, along with the artifacts of a long and fascinating life, many of those papers really are lost to fire and, as Wes notes in his post, they will be difficult (but likely not impossible) to replace. Getting reprints from Russian publications isn't easy even today, but many of them have now been translated into English so that certainly helps. The most important thing, obviously, is that the two of them are safe and healthy. They'll be renting a house while theirs is rebuilt. Fire may have taken many things from them, but not their dignity, their resolve or their memories.