Undoubtably true. I think all of us in science have had the experience of reading a paper and thinking, “Who the hell reviewed this piece of crap?!” Actually, I just got a comment published on a paper that fell into that category IMHO…and it was in a prestigious “letters” journal no-less.
Fortunately, I don’t think the refereeing process has to be perfect in order for it to work okay. I.e., it doesn’t have to keep out all the garbage and let through all the good work. If it occasionally lets a piece of garbage through or rejects a good piece of work, that can be annoying (particularly for the authors involved in the latter case)…but it usually won’t dramatically set back science.
However, in the political realm there has been an attempt to capitalize on this imperfection in highly politically-charged fields such as evolution / creation and global warming. So, creationists and global warming deniers will submit papers to journals (often carefully selected for known editorial weaknesses) and will then play up the papers which actually get through…i.e., try to use this to confer respectability on their point-of-view. This is why it is important to emphasize that peer-review is important but not infallible and that one still has to look at the entire body of peer-reviewed work in a field to see what the general consensus is, rather than just cherry-picking a few papers from the broad body of literature that happen to agree with one’s point-of-view.
I think practice varies somewhat in different fields, and in different journals. In my own experience, I have only dealt with the editor once I have received the reviewers comments, and my article has never been sent back to the reviewers (at least as far as I know).
In an article I have in press on African birds, of the 3 initial reviews, one was favorable with only minor comments and 2 (actually a joint review from a married couple) were highly negative. They found fault with everything I had done, nitpicked everything to death, and recommended that the article be published in a highly abbreviated form if it were published at all. Since I had never published in this area before, they didn’t know me and I think they were just being territorial. In any case, I wrote a very extended response to the editor in which I refuted most of their objections (I concede on a few minor points). As far as I know, the editor never sent it back to them, and accepted my rewrite in which I included additional data that answered the reviewers’s objections.
I don’t get it. It seems all the paper said was the Precambrian Explosion - a unique event in the history of the planet - requires a better theory to explain that the current ones. Nothing about ID or creationism. Physicists would be jumping up and down at irregularities like this (if confirmed). Such is how science progresses.
I seriously wonder about the future of the science of biology in the United States.
No, it says that no current theories can explain it, but design can.
From the last paragraph of the article:
Bolding mine.
Of course, one thing ignored by the ID explanation is that the designer can’t really have been very intelligent at all, since a large number of the novel body plans that originated in the Cambrian disappeared in a short time when their lineages became extinct. It seems to me that the designer must have been pretty incompetent or else just screwing around.
There’s lots of stuff in Physics that can’t be explained adequately by current theory, including the connection between quantum theory and general relativity, dark energy, dark matter, and so on. Physicists admit there are gaps in current theory, while at the same time trying to close them.
Right, because peer review is not there to make sure an article will stand the test of criticism & time, but to make sure it has logical face validity, isn’t covering what’s been covered, doesn’t have huge holes in the background literature review, and so on. If the reviewers had caveats, but said publish it anyway, then it should be published. If it’s bunk, that’ll come out.
Pointing out how current scientific theories cannot explain observation X is perfectly valid science, IMO. Hell, scientists in many fields have set out research agendas which are the roadmaps to finding scientific answers. If the author in this example jumped to an intelligent design conclusion via an argument from ignorance, it still may be worth publishing if the basic science is correct; i.e., there’s a hole in the current state of scientific understanding. If the author has a coherent argument why the gap implies intelligent design, then it should be published in order to be further investigated. Hell, the bible code was first published in a statistics journal; it got beat up and shown to be bunk by statisticians, but that’s one of the ways we produce knowledge, isn’t it? Yeah, the theory turns out to be no good, but in analyzing it we learn something.
So I say that if it is logical and well done, then publish the hell out of it. But if it’s rehashing old arguments, incomplete in its lit review, or logically flawed, then don’t. No reason to let ideology stand in the way of publishing.
Having some first-hand knowledge of reviewing myself, I still am a bit incredulous. It’s difficult to me to understand how one editor could sucessfully sidestep the entirety of a scientific society so harshly criticle of the paper’s content. I smell a rat. I think other ediors shrugged and looked the other way, then, seeing how violent the reaction was, did a bit of revisionist history.
We live in an era of online publishing. The only substantial resource required for Intelligent Design theorists to create their own journals - other than the ability to actually do science - is the willingness of some interested parties (biology professors at evangelical Christian colleges, perhaps?) to step forward and act as editors, peer reviewers, and so forth.
Maybe the Discovery Institute, which seems to have plenty of money to push for ID in the schools, could find some cash to pay a couple of people to edit an ID ‘scientific’ journal.
Unless one already exists, but my Web searching has come up empty. Anyone know of such a journal? If none exists, I would regard that as substantial evidence of ID’s lack of scientific seriousness: if they claim they can’t get their science published in mainstream scientific journals, then the solution is to develop their own. If too little ID science is being done to fill even a quarterly, then far too little ID science has been done to rate its being taught in the schools.
The Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal claims to be such a thing, but then there’s a difference between form and content, isn’t there? Oops, you asked for “Intelligent Design”, not creationism, sorry.
Not to mention, it publishes articles like this, which basically says, “there aren’t ‘nice’ solar eclipses on the uninhabited planets, and that’s an argument for intelligent design.”
Indeed!
Speaking of the divide between old-earth ID and young-earth creationism: considering that the adherents of both ideas are overwhelmingly evangelical Christians, living in the same subculture of American society, you’d expect - assuming intellectual honesty - some intense debates between the proponents of these schools of thought. But my observation is that they all feel as if they’re on the same ‘side’ against Big Bad Evilution.
And they are, of course: their goal is to promote (as they understand the term) God, rather than to seek scientific truth. And if contradictory theories both achieve that purpose, then they are indeed on the same side, despite the irreconcilable differences between the two ideas.
AFAIK, since he was the editor in chief, all he had to do was sidestep one associate editor. There is no reason most of the society would have had anything to do with it. I know some of the other associate editors, and I am certain they would never would have stood for one second what the editor did if they had had the slightest inkling beforehand.
I think I misspoke about the bible code; i.e., it was published as a “challenging puzzle.” Robert Kass, then editor of Statistical Sciences wrote, in the introduction to the 1999 article debunking the bible code, the following:
So I was in error.
Still, I don’t see what the problem is. If the editor got gobbelty gook published, the response should be humbling at least. Surely everyone knows it’s foolish to “debate” a creationist on her terms, so let them debate under the rules of evidence and logic.
Perhaps, but there are all kinds of small niche scientific journals, literally thousands of them. If ID is as important a scientific field as it is purported to be, it undoubtedly would merit its own journal.
A) I guess all caps isn’t such a capital idea and I will desist unless I REALLY think it contributes.
B) I am from Chicago, born and raised in Hyde Park, though there were days when even I wondered if Hyde Park was part of Chicago
C) I am not sure about the etiquette here so let me know what other things I should avoid doing. I will say I didn’t understand about setting myself apart from you. Our names aren’t similar (dropzone<>lasvegaskid). Am I missing something?
I don’t think so. If the ID claim is that they’re doing science, and that scientific research is being done by a number of scientists (as opposed to one or two isolated cranks), then they need some sort of medium for the sharing of ideas, so that different scientists can read and criticize each others’ work, and build on each others’ results, the way scientists do in any scientific field.
Another reason why such a journal would be needed is for the vetting of the science as science. (If it’s a real scientific field, then they’ve got to have real scientific standards.)
You don’t need to start a journal to publish one article. But if there’s a burgeoning scientific field here, there’s a need for a journal. And if there isn’t, then there’s no case for presentation of ID in schools.
