Peer review
Jul 18th 2005Wallabynerd alert
… critics suggest that some reviewers might be unqualified and others are biased due to personal or professional rivalries.
http://www.scienceboard.net/community/news/news.263.html
Now that’s a surprise.
7 Responses to “Peer review”
Ed Darrell on 31 Jul 2005 at 3:45 am #
But at least science has peer review, as opposed to intelligent design . . .
Wallaby on 31 Jul 2005 at 3:41 pm #
Oh, good grief. Peer review doesn’t keep utter rubbish out of journals, nor does it keep out work based on bad experiments. There’ve been any number of cases in the past few decades of work that’s been published and later retracted when it turned out the authors were literally making it up. It’s real good at preventing work from being published that violates the reviewer’s pet theories and biases, both about the work in question and about the people who did it.
Papers written from an ID standpoint *have* been peer reviewed (by other scientists who don’t necessarily accept ID) and found worthy of publication. This usually causes a huge controversy by scientists with their evolutionary blinders on. See above re “personal and professional rivalries”.
Ed Darrell on 10 Aug 2005 at 12:36 pm #
Almost any time garbage gets published it causes a fuss. No, peer review isn’t 100% effective at catching the garbage.
But it beats the intelligent design method, which is to have no peer review at all except for blurbs the publicity agent can get for the screed.
Peer review is one more check against falsehood, error and exaggeration. Intelligent design would benefit from having any such checks.
Sure, two ID articles have sneaked into print. When there are 2,000 such articles, come let us know that it’s ready to be discussed. At the current rate, the 2,000th ID article will be published within the next 14,000 years — by which time most of the geology denied by all of creationism will have been witnessed by humans and recorded on videotape, along with all the evolution ID guys deny.
The Chicago White Sox used to complain that Mickey Mantle wasn’t the be all and end all of baseball players. Losers always grouse about the cream of the winners. ID grouses about peer review . . .
Wallaby on 11 Aug 2005 at 6:12 pm #
I’m curious… are there topics which you don’t leap on as a springboard to knock holes in ID? Surely it gets tedious to see the world (or even the world of science) as revolving around this one issue. A significant one, to be sure, whichever explanation one favors, but there’s plenty of other stuff to talk about. Which is why this site has never been exclusively about ID, or even exclusively about science. Perhaps you should broaden your horizons?
Only two “ID articles” published in peer-reviewed journals? Funny, Dembski (in 2003) gave a list of four articles in biology journals written from a design perspective; that list doesn’t include at least two more which I know have been published since then. There are others in the mathematical literature, considering what sort of statistical/information properties would constitute evidence of design. Perhaps you need to review the literature more thoroughly, or more often.
You don’t even have to use Web of Science — as even a cursory check makes clear, there are quite a lot of other publications. “But they’re only books, and nobody reviews books!” Do you really suppose that scientists work in isolation from their peers just because they’re willing to consider (or look for) evidence for design? “But that’s just other fools who also believe in design! doesn’t count!” Guess what? half — at least — of getting anything published, article or book, involves being reviewed by people who agree with the basic assumptions of the particular specialty.
To take another example: My research involves the application of vibrational spectroscopy to bone biomechanics. Would it get published if it’s reviewed exclusively by people convinced that vibrational techniques have no place whatsoever outside of a chemistry lab? Most likely not. Does that mean it’s “bad” or “anti-science”? No, just that it depends on the reviewer having an open mind about this particular technique.
Which gets back to the original point — that the outcome of peer review, all too often, does boil down to whether the reviewer shares the assumptions that the work was done under. I.e., politics and personalities.
For the record, I’m hardly an ardent defender of design; I freely admit that I haven’t had time or money (grad student) to read much since Behe’s original book. So you might drop the idea that I’m an “ID loser” grousing about peer review exclusively because of what “the Man” has done to ID. Like I said — there’s plenty of other stuff to talk about, and plenty more behind posts than ID.
Fresh Wallaby Juice » “Peer review” re-viewed on 26 Aug 2005 at 8:35 pm #
[...] “Peer review” re-viewed [...]
Ed Darrell on 29 Aug 2005 at 10:52 pm #
Sure, there are other topics where I skewer miseducation — you rarely blog on any of them. If you do, I’ll let you know.
In the meantime, why is it this blog is so transfixed with defending the pseudoscientific shenanigans of ID advocates? Surely there is other pseudoscience you could defend — astrology, spoon bending, protection from anthrax via skin cream, psychic surgery, or something.
Dembski has an unusual knack for “citing” articles that in no way support ID, or often, say anything at all about it. If you truly have six articles on ID, bully for you. That’s one more than Einstein wrote himself in 1905 — and one of his was confirmed in 14 years. With six articles, ID has yet to posit any research hypothesis, let alone test one.
But listing books on Amazon isn’t persuasive with me. (You failed to list the books of Deepak Chopra, by the way . . .)
If I dared you to take a photograph of an ID laboratory in action, do you think you could get such a thing within the next two decades?
Are you seriously arguing that there is bias against ID in publishing? That argument was revealed to be false, in federal court, in 1981. I know, I know — you guys don’t like to do literature searches for anything that might run contrary to your claims; still, the case is there, it’s solid law, and the fact remains that Dembski has never had a paper rejected by any biology journal, nor has Behe.
So the question is, why don’t they submit their work for review where it counts? Why do they publish only where they can subvert an editor or two? Or worse, with Regnery (see Jonathan Wells)?
As I noted before, ID is still hundreds of articles short of making a case.
When does somebody start the research?
Wallaby on 30 Aug 2005 at 10:11 am #
>Sure, there are other topics where I skewer miseducation — you rarely blog >on any of them. If you do, I’ll let you know.
Oh, phew. I was worried you might overlook an opportunity, however small, to correct the world’s errors. As you are well aware, challenging anything said here that’s remotely skeptical of the scientific establishment or evolutionary thought will surely bring the fledgling ID movement to a screeching halt. I’m a key linchpin of it, and all.
>In the meantime, why is it this blog is so transfixed with defending the >pseudoscientific shenanigans of ID advocates? Surely there is other >pseudoscience you could defend — astrology, spoon bending, protection from >anthrax via skin cream, psychic surgery, or something.
As I noted above, this blog isn’t exactly transfixed with defending anything — I’ve never intended it as a blog to “defend” ID, or particularly to “attack” evolution. It is, as the masthead informs you, a mix of work-related and personal thoughts from a chemist. Some of those involve claims about evolution; most do not. A chemist tends to run into evolution far more frequently than he runs into astrology, spoon bending, and the like; this doesn’t mean that I’m obsessed with it, nor that I’m a rabid fan of ID.
>Dembski has an unusual knack for “citing” articles that in no way support >ID, or often, say anything at all about it. If you truly have six articles >on ID, bully for you. That’s one more than Einstein wrote himself in 1905 >— and one of his was confirmed in 14 years. With six articles, ID has yet >to posit any research hypothesis, let alone test one.
Darrell, meanwhile, has an unusual knack for parroting Sagan and Dawkins, and dismissing other papers he doesn’t agree with as “garbage” with no attempt to explain *why* they’re “garbage”, or why the world should believe him instead of them.
Same thing again — show me a specific example, from the list I pointed you to, where Demsbki has “cited” an article that says nothing at all about ID. (Saying that he’s done so on some occasion in the past isn’t enough; surely his “unusual knack” will be displayed in his selections there.) Give your evidence, or stop poisoning the well without proof. (Isn’t that what you ask ID to do?)
>But listing books on Amazon isn’t persuasive with me. (You failed to list >the books of Deepak Chopra, by the way . . .)
They don’t persuade you that intelligent design has been featured in any number of books, including scientific monographs (or work claiming to be scientific, to steal your thunder)? Or are you simply unable to make the connection that “if there are a dozen or more people writing seriously about similar topics from very similar perspectives, then perhaps they’ve discussed each other’s work”?
>If I dared you to take a photograph of an ID laboratory in action, do you >think you could get such a thing within the next two decades?
First, we’d have to agree on what constitutes “an ID laboratory in action”. So, what tools or methods would you require in “an ID laboratory in action”? (Bear in mind that tools specifically useful for experiments that “defend” evolution are as out of place in “an ID laboratory” as they would be in mine, which has nothing to do with evolution.)
If I dared *you* to publish a paper relating the precise course of evolution, from eukaryotes to man with every step along the way, with *experimental* proof for each and every bit (rather than “these three experiments work, so we can infer back a billion years and call it ‘proven’”) — do you think you could *ever* get such a thing?
>Are you seriously arguing that there is bias against ID in publishing? >That argument was revealed to be false, in federal court, in 1981. I know, >I know — you guys don’t like to do literature searches for anything that >might run contrary to your claims; still, the case is there, it’s solid >law, and the fact remains that Dembski has never had a paper rejected by >any biology journal, nor has Behe.
Formal bias wasn’t present in 1981. It’s a good thing there’s a law against formal bias against ID; why, there are laws against racism, too, and therefore we certainly don’t have any more of *that*.
Informal bias (which you always do a good job of manifesting) is certainly present. If you ran a journal, would you publish ID-related papers? Not likely; you consider them “garbage”. Why? because they don’t involve elaborate phylogenies of which butterfly evolved from which. (I’m trying to be charitable, here, and assume that you simply don’t consider a statistical approach to biological information, for instance, to be valued at par with collecting specimens from exotic settings. We won’t tell the bioinformatics world about that.)
How is this bias? It’s insisting that experiments whose underlying assumptions you disagree with aren’t worth publishing. (Or that you don’t consider some activities “research” at all, because they’re “too theoretical”.) It’s insisting that work from specific individuals is a little less reliable because they include “too many citations” whose actual support for the ideas or data they’re cited for is perhaps open to doubt. Gee, do you suppose either one of these amounts to the “personal or professional” factors that influence peer review? (Which, rather than ID, is what this post was about.)
>So the question is, why don’t they submit their work for review where it >counts? Why do they publish only where they can subvert an editor or two? >Or worse, with Regnery (see Jonathan Wells)?
You’ll have to ask them, not me. If I were doing work that involved intelligent design, I’d have no particular objection to publishing it… but I’m not, as I think I’ve mentioned a time or two before, nor do I know the inner thoughts of any prominent ID researcher. The real question is why you waste such pearls as these for a readership of perhaps a dozen, on a site that’s not about defending (or attacking) ID.
>As I noted before, ID is still hundreds of articles short of making a case.
>
>When does somebody start the research?
What sort of research do you do, Ed? It’s all very well to sit around and parrot Sagan’s remarks, or Dawkins’ latest book, but if you’re going to squash the pseudoscientific nonsense of ID once and for all, it’s going to take deeds, not words. Pick out any system you like, of the ones that Behe or others has labeled “irreducibly complex”. Develop a plausible history of how that system has evolved from its early beginnings to its present complexity. And then test it. Use whatever line of bacteria or other lab critter you prefer, whatever other conditions — except one, you cannot introduce nucleic acids or proteins. Demonstrate that such a complex system really does evolve — not that it *could* have evolved because mutations happen — and evolutionary biology will reign supreme forever. (Of course, you really ought to have at least preliminary results after, say, 15 years. That’s clearly long enough.)
FWIW, Behe’s already stated — and yes, I *am* too lazy to look up just where — that that’s exactly the sort of experimental proof that’d shut him up, too. (If I remember correctly, the pro-evolutionary answer was “no, no it wouldn’t! you wouldn’t accept that, so there’s no point doing it!” — but I might be misremembering.)
“But evolution is already proven!” No, no it isn’t — or else it’d be blindingly obvious to every school child that ID is silly and that of course people came from prokaryotes, in the same way that it’s no surprise when they hear that gravity makes stuff fall down rather than up.
But me, I’m getting as tired of unsupported accusations about ID-ers and remarks ad hominem as you claim to be of ID-ers plugging their ears and saying “it can’t just happen, it CAN’T” without proving it. You want them to either prove it by research or quit whining; it’s only fair to ask the same of you. Put up or shut up.
I’ll wait.