[...]
>>>Pantrog: A former colleague of mine is a victim of the antievolution
conspiracy! He submitted a research paper to a peer-reviewed journal and it
was REJECTED!! Obviouosly, there is a vast, anti-naturalistic materialism
conspiracy being perpetrated by an elitist group of anti-Nature forces....
DNAunion: Did you even read the material at the link? Apparently not or you
wouldn't make such a silly statement. Here you go Pantrog, er.. I mean
HandJobFromYourMom, er... I mean Pangloss, er... I mean Huxter, here is a
sampling from that site.
>>>Michael Behe.
[My next letter to the editor follows]
July 19, 1999
Dear Dr. . . . ,
Well, I guess I should have expected it, but I have to admit I'm
disappointed. For the record I'd like to point out that the "senior [journal]
advisor" who reviewed my recent submission ("Obstacles to gene duplication .
. .") didn't react to my actual arguments in the paper, but to associations
he made. The manuscript did not argue for intelligent design, nor did it say
that complex systems would never be explained within Darwinian theory.
Rather, it just made the simple, obvious, and unarguable point that gene
duplication by itself is an incomplete explanation. Apparently, however, my
skepticism about Darwinism overshadowed all other points. Everything I wrote
beyond the first sentence was pretty much ignored or dismissed without
engagement. I should also point out that, on the one hand, my paper discussed
published experiments on specific genes in the clotting cascade of mice, the
published misinterpretation of those experiments, and why that shows we need
more information than sequence similarity to explain the origin of the
cascade and other systems. The senior advisor, on the other hand, discussed
our "glorious age" of biology, the history of science, how the world has "an
intelligence much greater than our intelligence," God as "a being that
combines consciousness, will, and universal power," and so on. Yet he thinks
he's being scientific and I'm being metaphysical. Go figure.
I must admit I'm quite surprised by your current stance, Dr. . . . . In our
email correspondence you wrote that you were "painfully aware of the
close-mindedness of the scientific community to non-orthodoxy" and that you
would entertain a manuscript from me that was "sufficiently provocative and
lively." That led me to believe that I could express skepticism of Darwinism
and still have a hearing. But then in your rejection letter you worry about
"the controversial nature of your letter to [the journal]" as if you weren't
expecting controversy, and you choose to send the manuscript to be reviewed
by someone who says things like "If evolutionary pathways were difficult to
find, nature faced these difficulties and solved them" (so there!)--not
exactly the sentiments of someone with an open mind. Well, perhaps you've had
a change of heart. That can happen if one discovers that the
"close-mindedness of the scientific community" has some bite to it. But as
the senior advisor bravely writes, "Let us speak about it again in 1000
years." Perhaps by then the readers of [the journal] will be able to handle
skepticism.
Sincerely,
Michael J. Behe
Professor of Biological Sciences
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