Memo to Discovery Institute: 50 peer-reviewed ID-friendly papers won’t make any difference
| February 10, 2012 | Posted by News under News, Peer review |
Reflecting on what the Discovery Institute has learned after fifty peer-reviewed ID papers, David Klinghoffer writes about the pervasive claims on the Internet that there are no peer-reviewed ID papers (Evolution News & Views, February 8, 2012). The claims will probably continue to riff off each other’s authority. Many people need to say: “Not a single peer-reviewed paper!” for the sound effect alone.
The no-design people are building their cocoon world, where you, nature, and reality don’t belong. (And you – and we – are hardly the biggest part of what doesn’t belong.)
Meanwhile, Casey Luskin asks, so what good is peer review? (Evolution News & Views, February 10, 2012),
Some of the most important and groundbreaking work in the history of science first appeared in published form not in peer-reviewed scientific journal articles but in scientific books. That includes Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus and Newton’s Principia. Einstein’s original paper on relativity was published in a scientific journal (Annalen der Physik), but did not undergo formal peer-review.1 Indeed, Darwin’s own theory of evolution was first published in a book for a general and scientific audience — his Origin of Species — not in a peer-reviewed paper.
Moreover, important scientific work has not uncommonly been initially rejected by peer-reviewed journals. As a 2001 article in Science observed, “Mention ‘peer review’ and almost every scientist will regale you with stories about referees submitting nasty comments, sitting on a manuscript forever, or rejecting a paper only to repeat the study and steal the glory.”2 Indeed, an article in the journal Science Communication by Juan Miguel Campanario notes that top journals such as “Science and Nature have also sometimes rejected significant papers,” and in fact “Nature has even rejected work that eventually earned the Nobel Prize.”3 In an amusing letter titled “Not in our Nature,” Campanario reminds the journal of four examples where it rejected significant papers:
Sure. Getting past peer review just means that the in crowd doesn’t need you to fail just now.
But we doubt that they intended to let it get to fifty. Big oops.
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2 Responses to Memo to Discovery Institute: 50 peer-reviewed ID-friendly papers won’t make any difference
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“As a 2001 article in Science observed, “Mention ‘peer review’ and almost every scientist will regale you with stories about referees submitting nasty comments, sitting on a manuscript forever, or rejecting a paper only to repeat the study and steal the glory.”
What utter wickedness. Note well, Elizabeth. In fact the whole article. I doubt if there is any official body as vicious as a professional establishment. Modern medicine is a great blessing on mankind, yet its history, again up to the present, has been blighted by extraordinarily vicious attacks on the most innovative thinkers – whose very existence they seemed to view as threatening their status – sometimes from luminaries in its governing bodies. I’d like to have seen them try to steal Einstein’s Relativity theories. Vermin.
The history of the world to this day (consider a majority of national leaders), is largely a chronicle of the ministrations of psychopaths down the millennia, and their inordinate influence on human affairs.
Psychopaths, ‘snakes in suits’, as they have been called in an eponymous book, are especially adept at reaching high office and, indeed, people it disproportionately. There are some fascinating articles online on the subject.
OT: This recent article from physorg is interesting;
I guess part of the reason for the skepticism against ‘scaled-up quantum computing’ is because, despite huge investment, so far man’s attempt at quantum computation is very modest,,,
Perhaps these researchers, if they are looking for actual proof that ‘scaled up quantum computing’ can actually be done, should look to DNA, where ‘scaled up quantum computing’, on a massive scale, is happening right before our eyes!
Also of related interest:
Verse and Music: