The letter, by Vladimir Svetlov, a microbiologist at Ohio State University, chides Nature for making such a big deal out of the fact that a pro-ID article was published in a peer-reviewed journal science journal.
"I cannot in all honesty share in the anxiety surrounding publication of a dubious paper on 'intelligent design'—regarded by most scientists as a version of creationism—in a journal with an impact factor of less than one," says Svetlov
"Your News story "Peer-reviewed paper defends theory of intelligent design" (Nature 431, 114; 2004) suggests that getting an intelligent-design paper into a peer-reviewed journal is a huge achievement for creationism."
To the contrary, he
argues, the real surprise is that ID proponents didn't get such a publication earlier.
Why? Because "one can publish just about anything if one goes far enough down the list of impact factors.
There are papers all around us containing problems glaring enough to fail their authors in undergraduate midterm exams."
may not understand why the publication of Meyer's paper was such a big deal.
But doing so affirms the likelihood that peer-reviewed journals have published some rubbish—maybe a good deal of it, as Svetlov