Re: Let's Review

On Apr 15, 8:36 am, "Mike Dworetsky"
<platinum...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Alexander" <alexanderhud...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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Wandering around at DI and UcD never does my blood pressure any good
but I have a morbid fascination for the bizarre leaps of logic and
reason that can happen there ('ID is just evidence for design nothing
more .... praaaaise Jeezus' etc.) but notice DI has put up its list of
peer reviewed literature again ... so let's review shall we:

Complete list here:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=264...

In this list you have various headings so lets see how impressive the
ID literature is, just on the numbers game, as ID is clearly
undermining the very foundations of evolutionary science ... ahem ...
here we go:

Featured articles:
7 articles
2 of which are in 'Darwinism, Design, & Public Education' and are
variously penned by Minnich, Meyer, Behe and Dembski. Oh ... there's
one by Lonnig in 'Dynamical Genetics' apparently

Ok ... next bit is:
'Complete List'

um ... ok - not sure why this had to be separate from 'Featured
Articles' (apparently the 'featured articles' are of 'higher interest'
to readers) but let's move on:

'Peer-Reviewed Scientific Books Supportive of Intelligent Design
Published by Trade Presses or University Presses'

4 books listed, one by Dembski (The Design Inference) and Behe
(Darwin's Black Box). I seem to recall something happening in
someplace called Dover that called into question the degree of 'peer
review' that actually goes on with these tomes, but I digress.

So ... anyway ... 4 books that should probably fall into the category
of 'popsci' (if you were feeling generous, there was a following wind
and hell had frozen over)

Next up:
'Scientific Books Supportive of Intelligent Design Published by
Prominent Trade Presses'

3 books listed ... to whit:
Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our
Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery (Regnery Publishing,
2004).

William Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot be
Purchased without Intelligence (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2002).

Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler & Adler, 1985).

Nuff sed on those ... also I notice that the term 'peer review' has
been dropped from the heading (but emphatically pronounced
elsewhere ... are we to assume that these volumes weren't peer
reviewed?)

Next:
'Peer-Reviewed Philosophical Books Supportive of Intelligent Design
Published by Academic University Presses'

Er ... 'philosophical books ...' ?

Well ok. They are peer reviewed articles I suppose ... both of them

Moving on:
'Articles Supportive of Intelligent Design Published in Peer-Reviewed
Scientific Journals'

Being generous again but let's just suppose these articles really are
'supportive' of ID you get another 9 articles (1 by Behe, 2 by Axe, 1
by Meyer). The question I find rising to my somewhat cynical and
jaded mind is why these are only 'supportive' ... are they articles on
ID or not?

Glutton for punishment that I am ... I move on:

'Articles Supportive of Intelligent Design Published in Peer-Reviewed
Scientific Anthologies'

Lonnig's article from Dynamical Genetics gets name check number 2
which is generous I thought ... it must be really really really
supportive (and DI does mention that articles appear twice in the
list ... I have no idea why they would do this - I can't see my
psychology tutor giving me extra credit for placing references that
have 'higher interest' twice within a bibliography).

12 articles are listed here - one cites '5 articles' from 'Darwinism,
Design, & Public Education' which abbreviates to 'DDPE' and (it must
be coincidence) that gives a total of 10 of which are either cited to
Darwinism, Design, & Public Education or the mysterious journal DDPE

NEXT ...:

'Peer-Edited or Editor-Reviewed Articles Supportive of Intelligent
Design Published in Scientific Journals, Scientific Anthologies and
Conference Proceedings'

Well ok - nothing like covering your bases ... and this is nothing
like it as we have 7 articles, including 4 unnamed articles from
'DEBATING DESIGN: FROM DARWIN TO DNA (Cambridge, United Kingdom,
Cambridge University Press, 2004)'

These are (we are assured) 'science' articles. Detail, gentle reader,
is sadly lacking.

There are also no less than 15 (count 'em ... 15) articles in:
"MERE CREATION: SCIENCE, FAITH & INTELLIGENT DESIGN"

Impressive huh? Well sort of, until you get to this bit:

(William A. Dembski ed., 1998).

According to the blurb the journal:
'...contains fifteen scientific and philosophical essays supportive of
the theory of intelligent design written by Ph.D.-level scientists and
philosophers.'

No mention of what these articles are or even the titles of their
supportive nature. Words fail me.

Finally:
'Articles Supportive of Intelligent Design Published in Peer-Reviewed
Philosophy Journals'

Um ... philosophy.... again? Sorry but with the best wishes in the
world wrestling with a personal episteme and the deep issues of
ontology probably doesn't feature highly in day to day lab work or
develop evidence of design.

Anyway - we're concerned with the 'peer review' bit so lets count all
4 articles as technically 'in'.

What does that give us:

67 'articles', the most recent of which were written in 2005 (well I'm
sure the Biologic Institute is about to spring into action any time
soon and reams of work will be available very shortly) and 7 of which
were apparently counted twice.

Using DI criteria (which seems to extend to absolutely _anything_
remotely connected to ID) I had a wander over to PubMed and looked for
items containing the word 'evolution' in the abstract and had been
published in the past 12 months:

370 069 hits.

That doesn't seem entirely fair so I put in 'evolution AND evidence'
in the summary, limited the search to the past 12 months and asked
that it only returned English papers and articles etc - it really
shows how little work is done using or assuming evolutionary
processes:

A meagre 1700 hits

This still doesn't seem fair so I'll cut the search to 'core clinical
journals' with the key words of evolution AND evidence in the abstract
over the past 12 months only.

Yay ... finally only 24 hits.

See ... ID research is outstripping the volume of evolutionary related
research by nearly 3 to 1.

Finally some statistics to conclusively support ID based purely on the
number of published research articles. Sadly as the earliest ID
article cited is from 1985 and the page appears to represent the
entire canon of ID research that's around 6 articles a year or so. If
that. Also a large number appear to be in the mysterious journal
'DDPE' (ed. W. Dembski esq.) - Although I'm sure that goes for peer
review amongst various members of the non-ID community. At least that
would be the honest thing to do, rather than just claim 'peer review'
is in fact a hand picked group of your 'peers' who just agree with
you.

Hmmm ... maybe the ID brigade aren't making such progress after all -
the only logical explanation is (you guessed it) that the evil cabal
of atheist scientists (not that ID has anything to do with God
remember) plotting to overthrow the world with their materialistic
ways while munching on baby burgers topped off with stem cells have
stopped all access to the journals through their control of the
mainstream media, education and flouridated water. Being a scientist
is tough these days - not only do you have to spend years studying
your chosen field you are now expected to master the intricacies of
behaving like a villain from a Bond movie.

At least the pay and hot babes are good.

I thankyou.

An average of 6 articles a year (many of which would not qualify as
peer-reviewed articles in journals) is about equivalent to the research
output of one typical biomed researcher, or less. And biomed researchers
usually publish original research, not articles about "philosophy".

So the entire canon of "science" in ID is equivalent of the output of about
one normal active scientist. Yet the ID activists are numerous. So the
conclusion is that they are not really doing research that supports ID.

How can one possibly claim "equal time" for an "idea" which represents less
science than one average scientist might produce over 20 years? And that's
being generous: I have seen ID-ists claim that there is published refereed
research and then they cite ONLY the single Stephen Meyers article which the
journal withdrew.

--
Mike Dworetsky

(Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

ID can only be explained in terms of a strategy that depends on trying
to have everything both ways.

When it's convenient IDers admit that they have no inerest in
submitting papers because they prefer non-peer-review outlets (pop
pseudoscience books, websites, etc.). At other times they trot out the
usual nonsense about being shut out by the "Darwinist" orthodoxy.

.

Relevant Pages

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