[asa] Is Peer-Review the Be All and End All of Science?

Someone just posted this on FR. ~ Janice :)

<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1739908/posts>Is
Peer-Review the Be All and End All of Science?
Evolution News & Views ^ | November 15, 2006 | Robert Crowther
Posted on 11/16/2006 5:26:06 PM EST by DaveLoneRanger
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1739908/posts

Science writer Denyse O'Leary has just published
a
<http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2006/11/15/lstrongglemgintroduction_l_emg_peer_revi>four-part
series about peer-review on her Post-Darwinist
website. It is a thorough overview of what
peer-review is and what some of the problems are
with the current system. She has some interesting
ideas on how this may be resolved in the future,
but it is her identification of one major problem
that is of most interest to the ID/evolution debate.

O'Leary notes that:

Generally, the two most common complaints are
that peer review fails to safeguard quality,
which was its original purpose and that it
punishes new ideas, regardless of merit. ...

Findings that support a consensus are too easily
accepted - that is the inevitable flip side to squelching new ideas.

Indeed, this is one of the problems that many
design scientists have run up against in trying
to get their papers published. Michael Behe has
<http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=450>written
about some of the problems he's faced in getting
published in peer-review journals:
The take-home lesson I have learned is that,
while some science journal editors are
individually tolerant and will entertain thoughts
of publishing challenges to current views, when a
group (such as the editorial board) gets together, orthodoxy prevails.

Here are direct quotes from letters responding to
submissions by Behe written by editors of major scientific journals:
I'm torn by your request to submit a (thoughtful)
response to critics of your non-evolutionary
theory for the origin of complexity. On the one
hand I am painfully aware of the close-mindedness
of the scientific community to non-orthodoxy, and
I think it is counterproductive. But on the other
hand we have fixed page limits for each month's
issue, and there are many more good submissions
than we can accept. So, your unorthodox theory
would have to displace something that would be extending the current paradigm.

Another journal editor writes:
As you no doubt know, our journal has supported
and demonstrated a strong evolutionary position
from the very beginning, and believes that
evolutionary explanations of all structures and
phenomena of life are possible and inevitable.
Hence a position such as yours, which opposes
this view on other than scientific grounds,
cannot be appropriate for our pages.

Of course Behe supports his work on completely
scientific grounds, but the editorial board had
already decided that someone whose views didn't
completely match theirs would not be allowed to
be heard. Behe defended his work as science in a
letter responding to one journal that opted not to publish him:
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.

O'Leary hits the nail on the head in recognizing
the main problem with the current peer-review system.
The overwhelming flaw in the traditional peer
review system is that it listed so heavily toward
consensus that it showed little tolerance for
genuinely new findings and interpretations. The
print and postage-based technologies of the
mid-twentieth century greatly increased the
significance of this flaw because only a few
parties could afford to operate publishing
systems. A small like-minded cabal can easily get
control of such a system and run it into the
ground, without significant challenge. By
contrast, Internet-based technologies permit
widespread low-cost access. The Internet may help
to restore a more open and creative conversation
- though it certainly won't sound pretty at first.

To sum up, science journals that are wedded to
Darwinian evolution refuse to publish authors who
explicitly advocate intelligent design. Then
Darwinists attack intelligent design as
unscientific because it isn't published in
peer-reviewed journals. As Borat might say, "very nice."

For years the Darwinian lobbyists at the National
Center for Science Education (NSCE) have falsely
complained that scientists who support the theory
of intelligent design don’t publish peer-reviewed
articles, never mind that we have
<http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2640>listed
a number of pro-ID peer-reviewed papers on the
Discovery Institute website. And there are
hundreds of peer-reviewed articles that challenge
one aspect or another of Darwinian evolution in the scientific literature.

When an article has appeared in a biology journal
that the NCSE couldn't spin out of existence,
they immediately clamored that the article
shouldn’t have been published, despite the fact
that it was approved by peer-review.

The article in question was, of course,
<http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2177>"The
Origin of Biological Information and the Higher
Taxonomic Categories," written by CSC Director
Dr. Stephen Meyer, and it appeared in the biology
journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of
Washington. The Proceedings is a peer-reviewed
biology journal published at the National Museum
of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington D.C. Meyer’s article explicitly
argued that the theory of intelligent design
explains the origin of the genetic information in
early animal forms better than current materialistic theories of evolution.

"It's too bad the Proceedings published it,"
lamented anthropologist Eugenie Scott, executive
director of the NCSE. "... This article is substandard science."

In an interview with The Scientist, the editor of
The Proceedings, Richard Sternberg, confirmed
that Meyer’s article went through the standard
peer-review process, and the three peer reviewers
of the paper "all hold faculty positions in
biological disciplines at prominent universities
and research institutions, one at an Ivy League
university, one at a major U.S. public
university, and another at a major overseas research institute."

At the time, Meyer commented, “Darwinists have
argued that intelligent design isn’t science
because it hasn’t been published in peer-reviewed
journals. But now that an increasing number of
scientists are making their case for design in
scientific publications, Darwinists are ready to
disown peer-review­temporarily, I’m sure.”

As O'Leary's
<http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2006/11/15/lstrongglemgintroduction_l_emg_peer_revi>report
on the state of peer-review asserts and the
responses from journal editors make obvious,
Darwinists seem to embrace peer-review only when
it confirms their pre-determined conclusions.
Their goal isn’t peer-review, it’s censorship.
They want to squelch any dissent from the Darwinian paradigm.

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Received on Thu Nov 16 17:50:16 2006