Posted by: Caleb | May 15, 2008

Intelligent Design Scientists and Peer-Reviewed Publication

Often those who study and espouse a form of ID are ridiculed as not using the scientific method and not having anything published in peer-reviewed publications. This list will lay that nonsense to rest. There will be those who will call the list short, but you have to remember that the number of scientists who study ID are far fewer (and have far less access to funding) than those who espouse Darwinian evolution so it is to be expected that ID’ers would have fewer publications (not to mention the hostility to ID that also undoubtedly makes it harder to get published).

Posted in External Link, Intelligent Design, Peer Reviewed, Science, Uncategorized

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Responses

Why is it “nonsense” to hold cdesign proponentsists who allege that they are doing science to the same standard as real scientists who are doing real science? Do the cdesign proponentsists wish to be considered to be real scientists, or don’t they?

By the way, I have noticed that one of your favorite retorts is “Well, have you actually read [title of article by cdesign proponentsists]?” Naturally, it would by hypocritical of you to not hold yourself to the same standard you hold others, so I am sure that you must have read these articles yourself.

You have read them, haven’t you?

By: John the Skeptic on May 16, 2008
at 11:48 am

Hi John,
No I haven’t read all those articles. That was not the point of the post. The point of the post was simply to illustrate that ID scientists have been published in a number of respected, peer reviewed journals.
When I include a link to a specific article in a post, I make sure I read the entire article so that I can recognize flamers and do my best to adequately respond to criticisms.

By: Caleb on May 16, 2008
at 1:53 pm

Please note Caleb’s shell-game. What he actually says is that a couple of actual scientists who believe in ID have published papers in peer-reviewed journals. This is true. But what he implies is that there are papers in peer-reviewed journals that provide evidence supporting ID. This is totally false.

Michael Behe is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, and he has written and edited a couple of books on ID. (Most recently, “The Edge of Evolution” ;) Here is what Michael Behe admitted under oath in the Dover, PA trial (Kitzmiller v Dover School Board): “[T]here are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred.” (transcript for Oct 18, 2005, afternoon session) Behe and others can claim anything they like, but the threat of jail time for perjury tends to make one think twice about shading the truth. No wonder people call it the “Dishonesty Institute.”

The problem with peer review for ID is that it subjects them to critici1sm from people who actually understand the subject matter, rather than appealing to ignorant laypeople as they do. IDists complain that their papers are not accepted. The real problem, however, is that none have been submitted. Believe thee me, if a scientist submitted a paper containing solid, positive evidence that living organisms were intelligently designed, that scientuist would be on a fast track for a Nobel prize. But, so far….

By: Olorin on May 16, 2008
at 9:19 pm

Olorin, I looked up those transcripts where Behe was being questioned in the case and came up with some interesting results. As is often the case, looking at the context of a statement sheds a lot of light on it.

You can find the PDF files that I accessed to find this information at the following website:

http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/?path=trans/

The following is from the October 17, 2005 (morning session) of the trial (pp 51-52):
————————————————–

Q. Have you submitted any other articles on
intelligent design to peer reviewed science journals?
A. Yes, I did. One article I submitted to a journal
called the Journal of Molecular Evolution. And it
actually contained a subset of the material that was eventually published in the article or Reply to my Critics in the journal of Biology and Philosophy.
Q. Did they publish that article in that journal?
A. No, they didn’t.
Q. Did the publisher give you a reason for not doing
so?
A. Yes, he did.
MR. ROTHSCHILD: Objection, Your Honor. The
same hearsay.
MR. MUISE: Your Honor, it kind of
remarkable to me. He’s — you’ve heard throughout this trial that, you know, they are not submitting their articles for peer review. Here, he’s attempting to do that, and he’s got publishers that are telling him that they’re not going to publish them.

—————————————————–

Also, see p.45, line 15 where he specifically cites an article he wrote that he considers an ID article in a peer reviewed publication.

—————————————————

Also, if you look at pp 25-26 of the October 19 12am transcript, you will note that Behe states his book “Darwin’s Black Box” was actually peer-reviewed more thoroughly than many articles would be for a peer-reviewed publication. For more on this, also see the October 17 transcript, pp 33-34.
—————————————————-

Olorin, according the transcripts, Michael Behe, under oath, stated that articles he has written about ID for publication in peer reviewed journals have been rejected.

It is not that ID scientists aren’t writing and researching, it’s that there is a distinct bias among those who would publish their work.

By: Caleb on May 16, 2008
at 10:24 pm

“It is not that ID scientists aren’t writing and researching, it’s that there is a distinct bias among those who would publish their work.”

Where is your evidence of bias? There is no bias revealed in this transcript: Behe submitted an article, and it was rejected. Where is the bias?

By the way, one of the articles in this list was retracted by the publisher. If you had spent time in academia, you would know that it is exceedingly rare for a journal to retract an article, and that this only happens in instances of extreme academic malfeasance.

Why do you suppose, if there were honest evidence for them to rely on, that the cdesign proponentsists need to rely on dishonest evidence of this type?

By: John the Skeptic on May 17, 2008
at 1:56 am

Caleb’s shell game continues. “Also, see p.45, line 15 where he specifically cites an article he wrote that he considers an ID article in a peer reviewed publication.” Caleb means to imply by this that the article provides evidence for ID. What the article actually showed was that one small mechanism of evolution might not work quite the way that scientists had previously thought. The leap of logic is that anything that shows any error in evolutionary theory is ipso facto evidence for ID. I don’t think so.

Oh, and the ultimate debacle: Behe used one ton of soil to show that a certain mutation would only occur about once every 20,000 years. But he later admitted that a reasonable sample size would have been about a billion tons. Divide 20,000 by a billion, and the results look somewhat different.

In “The Edge of Evolution,” Behe claimed that evolutuion could not mutate the HIV virus in a certain way. A month after the book was published, a grad student at Oklahoma State U showed that such mutations had already occurred in HIV in less than ten years—completely shredding Behe’s argument.

As to peer review of “Darwin’s Black Box,” look a little further in the record. One of the “reviewers” was a veterinarian who, after considerable prodding, remembers a 10-minute telephone conversation about the book, but denies that he ever even saw it. None of the five reviewers gave it anything like a journal-paper review.

By: Olorin on May 17, 2008
at 3:28 am

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