Math journal retracted one of our UD authors’ accepted article only because Darwinist blogger complained
A brief, lay-friendly, look at Sewell’s stifled paper is here. Comment on it’s significance here.
This just in: Granville Sewell on the controversy.
[This post will remain at the top of the page until 5:00 pm EST. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]
Here, John G. West reports (Evolution News & Views, June 7, 2011) that University of Texas, El Paso math professor Granville Sewell has receive an apology and $10,000 because Applied Mathematics Letters withdrew his article on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, just before publication, based on the say so of a Darwinist blogger:
Witness the brazen censorship earlier this year of an article by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell, author of the book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Sewell’s article critical of Neo-Darwinism (“A Second Look at the Second Law”) was both peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the journal Applied Mathematics Letters. That is, the article was accepted for publication until a Darwinist blogger who describes himself as an “opinionated computer science geek” wrote the journal editor to denounce the article, and the editor decided to pull Sewell’s article in violation of his journal’s own professional standards.
Here, Discovery Institute lawyer Casey Luskin reflects on the public glee Darwin lobbyists indulged themselves in at that point.
The publisher of Applied Mathematics Letters (Elsevier, the international science publisher) has now agreed to issue a public statement apologizing to Dr. Sewell as well as to pay $10,000 in attorney’s fees.
Sewell’s lawyer Lepiscopo points out that in retracting Sewell’s article, Applied Mathematics Letters “effectively accepted the unsubstantiated word and unsupported opinion of an inconsequential blogger, with little or unknown academic background beyond a self-professed public acknowledgment that he was a ‘computer science grad’ and whose only known writings are self-posted blogs about movies, comics, and fantasy computer games.” This blogger’s unsupported opinion “trumped the views of an author who is a well respected mathematician with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Purdue University; a fully-tenured Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas–El Paso; an author of three books on numerical analysis and 40 articles published in respected journals; and a highly sought-after and frequent lecturer world-wide on mathematics and science.”
The journal’s editor even wrote a self-demeaning apology to the blogger, for having followed accepted professional standards. And now his journal has issued a public apology to prof Sewell instead.
As West suggests, the editor may have feared for his career, considering what happened to Smithsonian journal editor and evolutionary biologist Rick Sternberg, when he was driven out for publishing ID theorist Steve Meyer’s peer-reviewed article on the Cambrian explosion. More.
Some now ask whether, given a string of recent defeats, the Darwin lobby’s tactics are backfiring?