The Edge of Peer Review
|October 30, 2005||Posted by William Dembski under Evolution, Intelligent Design|
Robert Pennock’s Nature article with Richard Lenski on the evolutionary program AVIDA does not mention Michael Behe, irreducible complexity, or intelligent design (for a critique of that article, go here). And yet, when Pennock criticizes ID, the first thing he does is point to that article as a refutation of ID and, in particular, Michael Behe’s claim that irreducible complexity poses an obstacle to conventional evolutionary mechanisms. So, peer-reviewed articles that do not cite ID or its literature nonetheless constitute refutations of it, and yet peer-reviewed articles by ID proponents that do not explicitly mention ID (to avoid censorship) may not count as confirmations of it. The double-standard here is palpable. In this vein consider the following email I received:
Just writing to you to let you know that your work IS being used in peer review. Read the following link: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1208958. It is a paper by Jack Trevors and David Abel about the three subsets of complexity in realtion to biology. . . . The sad thing is that Trevors and Abel have been continually publishing critical commentaries on the origin of information in peer-review without reference to any IDists, though most of their work looks like it came straight from A. E. Wilder-Smith. Don’t believe me? Go here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15889338&query_hl=3
and then here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15563395&query_hl=3. So, no one can say that your ideas on the origin of information are not in peer review.