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Recent one I saw: https://retractionwatch.com/2020/10/07/elsevier-journal-disavows-but-does-not-retract-paper-on-intelligent-design/ https://retractionwatch.com

by yters 6y ago

Recent one I saw: https://retractionwatch.com/2020/10/07/elsevier-journal-disavows-but-does-not-retract-paper-on-intelligent-design/ https://retractionwatch.com/2020/10/07/elsevier-journal-disa...

eesmith 6y ago
(FWIW, this paper wasn't retracted, but that detail isn't that important. It's also an ID paper, not a YEC one; both are part of creationalism and the difference isn't important enough for the point of this discussion.) The key questions are: Do you think it was controversial merely because it was on ID? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a ID claim? It appears that paper falls solidly in my description of how such works get into print, eg, cherry-picking quotes: 1) added the keywords "intelligent design" after editorial review 2) "naive to the point of being silly" 3) "I can only speculate, but inattention to the details and unfamiliarity with the references might have played a role [in how the article made it into print]."
- yters 6y ago
  I don't follow why hiding references and names should matter, if that is even what was done. Shouldn't the content of the paper be paramount? It looks like a paper was accepted based on its own merits and then disowned when the editors discovered it may be associated with an unpopular viewpoint. I have no idea why that is acceptable in a professional venue.
  - eesmith 6y ago
    To answer your question "Shouldn't the content of the paper be paramount?" directly, NO! If the conclusions of the paper have already been demonstrated to be incorrect, but the authors both know those objections and leave out discussion of them, then it's a seriously flawed paper. Reviewers and editors cannot catch all merit-less papers. The acceptance system is based on a system of trust, including trust that the authors have highlighted possible flaws in their argument. There's also the post-publication review process, including retractions. Moreover, most reviewers will not have experience with creationist literature (because it's a pseudoscience with no predictive ability), so are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists. For example, "design" could mean "the result of natural evolutionary processes", but to a creationist it might mean the design of a creator, that is, as short-hand for "intelligent design." Had they used "intelligent design" at the start, it would have helped the reviewer understand the context. Leaving that out until after the review process ended makes me suspicious that this omission was deliberate.
    - yters 6y ago
      It seems like you are responding to something other than I said.
    - yters 6y ago
      To elaborate on my comment, if you've read the paper, they have a large section devoted to fine tuning, intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses, all with explicity references to the main authors, such as Dembski, and their works. I'm not really grasping how your comment is addressing the paper and the reason for the warning notice.
      - eesmith 6y ago
        Here's an example of what I mean: > William Dembski, who mainly belongs to the frequentist’s school in statistics, regards the fine-tuning argument as suggestive, as pointers to underlying design. Dembski's "design" is specifically "intelligent design". The blurb for the book cited starts. 'How can we identify events due to intelligent causes'. Is that the same type of design as the authors mean? Let's go back to the long discussion of what 'design' means: > A design is a specification or plan for the construction of an object or system, or the result of that specification or plan in the form of a product. ... Humans have a powerful intuitive understanding of design that precedes modern science. Our common intuitions invariably begin with recognizing a pattern as a mark of design. So, is DNA a 'specification or plan for the construction of an object'? For many proteins it certainly is. So, is DNA a design? According to this definition, yes! But Dembski's argument is that there must an intelligent designer. While biologists often use phrases like "evolution designed" to describe the results of standard evolution. Picking one paper from a Google Scholar search, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-71152-7_24 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-71152-7_... says "Immunology is frequently the prisoner of its own semantics. Evolution designed an immune system equipped to recognize all foreign antigens, the structure of which it cannot know in advance." Or in a summary from https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/202/202ec148.short https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/202/202ec148.short "In modern times, we turn up the thermostat if we’re cold, but evolution designed our bodies to acclimate to cold temperatures and maintain euthermia (normal body temperature) without the assistance of external climate control." Neither claim an intelligent designer involved, so that "powerful intuitive understanding of design" must include designs that were not created by a designer, yes? Which means that Dembski's use of the term 'design' is not shared by the general readership a biology journal, and omitting the qualifier intelligent design when talking about Dembski's work is a form of white-washing - just like I described when I wrote 'most reviewers ... are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists'. You write 'they have a large section devoted to ... intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses'. I see one paragraph which specifically calls out intelligent design. The next paragraph is on William Dembski. Is Dembski's work specifically ID? Then why wasn't Dembski's earlier work described that way? I looked at (Olofsson, 2008). It says outright "In a way, the ideas in The Design Inference and No Free Lunch are examples of an exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences." And cites other publications describing problems in Dembski's work. The third and last paragraph in this section claims that Dembski's work has been re-formulated as ASC, and implies that the re-formulation overcomes those criticisms. So, has it? It's not hard to find criticisms of ASC: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/evo-info-4-non-conservation-of-algorithmic-specified-complexity/ http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/evo-info-4-non-conservation-o... and https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2019/12/Is-Algorithmic-Specified-Complexity-Useless-for-Analyzing-Evolution.html https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2019/12/Is-Algorithmic-Spec... , for examples, the latter arguing "the connection to evolution is lacking". Given Dembski's earlier 'exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences' and the strength of the many previous criticisms, why are Thorvaldsen and Hössjer confident that ASC overcomes those criticisms? They don't say. You'll be hard-pressed to find a reviewer diligent enough to go through all of the citations to check for this level of undue optimism.

by yters 6y ago

Recent one I saw: https://retractionwatch.com/2020/10/07/elsevier-journal-disavows-but-does-not-retract-paper-on-intelligent-design/ https://retractionwatch.com/2020/10/07/elsevier-journal-disa...

eesmith 6y ago

(FWIW, this paper wasn't retracted, but that detail isn't that important. It's also an ID paper, not a YEC one; both are part of creationalism and the difference isn't important enough for the point of this discussion.) The key questions are: Do you think it was controversial merely because it was on ID? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a ID claim? It appears that paper falls solidly in my description of how such works get into print, eg, cherry-picking quotes: 1) added the keywords "intelligent design" after editorial review 2) "naive to the point of being silly" 3) "I can only speculate, but inattention to the details and unfamiliarity with the references might have played a role [in how the article made it into print]."

yters 6y ago
I don't follow why hiding references and names should matter, if that is even what was done. Shouldn't the content of the paper be paramount? It looks like a paper was accepted based on its own merits and then disowned when the editors discovered it may be associated with an unpopular viewpoint. I have no idea why that is acceptable in a professional venue.
- eesmith 6y ago
  To answer your question "Shouldn't the content of the paper be paramount?" directly, NO! If the conclusions of the paper have already been demonstrated to be incorrect, but the authors both know those objections and leave out discussion of them, then it's a seriously flawed paper. Reviewers and editors cannot catch all merit-less papers. The acceptance system is based on a system of trust, including trust that the authors have highlighted possible flaws in their argument. There's also the post-publication review process, including retractions. Moreover, most reviewers will not have experience with creationist literature (because it's a pseudoscience with no predictive ability), so are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists. For example, "design" could mean "the result of natural evolutionary processes", but to a creationist it might mean the design of a creator, that is, as short-hand for "intelligent design." Had they used "intelligent design" at the start, it would have helped the reviewer understand the context. Leaving that out until after the review process ended makes me suspicious that this omission was deliberate.
  - yters 6y ago
    It seems like you are responding to something other than I said.
  - yters 6y ago
    To elaborate on my comment, if you've read the paper, they have a large section devoted to fine tuning, intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses, all with explicity references to the main authors, such as Dembski, and their works. I'm not really grasping how your comment is addressing the paper and the reason for the warning notice.
    - eesmith 6y ago
      Here's an example of what I mean: > William Dembski, who mainly belongs to the frequentist’s school in statistics, regards the fine-tuning argument as suggestive, as pointers to underlying design. Dembski's "design" is specifically "intelligent design". The blurb for the book cited starts. 'How can we identify events due to intelligent causes'. Is that the same type of design as the authors mean? Let's go back to the long discussion of what 'design' means: > A design is a specification or plan for the construction of an object or system, or the result of that specification or plan in the form of a product. ... Humans have a powerful intuitive understanding of design that precedes modern science. Our common intuitions invariably begin with recognizing a pattern as a mark of design. So, is DNA a 'specification or plan for the construction of an object'? For many proteins it certainly is. So, is DNA a design? According to this definition, yes! But Dembski's argument is that there must an intelligent designer. While biologists often use phrases like "evolution designed" to describe the results of standard evolution. Picking one paper from a Google Scholar search, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-71152-7_24 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-71152-7_... says "Immunology is frequently the prisoner of its own semantics. Evolution designed an immune system equipped to recognize all foreign antigens, the structure of which it cannot know in advance." Or in a summary from https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/202/202ec148.short https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/202/202ec148.short "In modern times, we turn up the thermostat if we’re cold, but evolution designed our bodies to acclimate to cold temperatures and maintain euthermia (normal body temperature) without the assistance of external climate control." Neither claim an intelligent designer involved, so that "powerful intuitive understanding of design" must include designs that were not created by a designer, yes? Which means that Dembski's use of the term 'design' is not shared by the general readership a biology journal, and omitting the qualifier intelligent design when talking about Dembski's work is a form of white-washing - just like I described when I wrote 'most reviewers ... are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists'. You write 'they have a large section devoted to ... intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses'. I see one paragraph which specifically calls out intelligent design. The next paragraph is on William Dembski. Is Dembski's work specifically ID? Then why wasn't Dembski's earlier work described that way? I looked at (Olofsson, 2008). It says outright "In a way, the ideas in The Design Inference and No Free Lunch are examples of an exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences." And cites other publications describing problems in Dembski's work. The third and last paragraph in this section claims that Dembski's work has been re-formulated as ASC, and implies that the re-formulation overcomes those criticisms. So, has it? It's not hard to find criticisms of ASC: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/evo-info-4-non-conservation-of-algorithmic-specified-complexity/ http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/evo-info-4-non-conservation-o... and https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2019/12/Is-Algorithmic-Specified-Complexity-Useless-for-Analyzing-Evolution.html https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2019/12/Is-Algorithmic-Spec... , for examples, the latter arguing "the connection to evolution is lacking". Given Dembski's earlier 'exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences' and the strength of the many previous criticisms, why are Thorvaldsen and Hössjer confident that ASC overcomes those criticisms? They don't say. You'll be hard-pressed to find a reviewer diligent enough to go through all of the citations to check for this level of undue optimism.