The ID Report

Sorry to visit the Meyer affair yet again, but a recent letter to Nature makes a point that bears highlighting. 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.”

Svetlov may not understand why the publication of Meyer’s paper was such a big deal. As I pointed out in my first piece on this topic, it’s a big deal because the anti-ID crowd has invested so much in the claim that ID has never published in peer-reviewed publications (which is a canard to begin with; see “Media Backgrounder: Intelligent Design Article Sparks Controversy” on the Discovery Institute’s Web site). It’s also a big deal because ID proponents are consistently denied a level playing field. And getting published despite the unfairness is a significant accomplishment.

But Svetlov’s point about the ease of publishing bad science is an interesting one. For one thing, it exposes the double standard of those who have dedicated their lives (and livelihoods) to defending the public from the allegedly “bad science” of intelligent design while doing nothing about the genuinely bad science that’s published in many journals. (This is eerily reminiscent, by the way, of what happened with biology textbooks. While the anti-ID folks were out guarding the schools from the “bad science” of intelligent design, they serenely accepted even the most egregious errors, as documented in Jonathan Well’s book, Icons of Evolution, in textbooks used by millions of kids.)

More interesting, however, is the conundrum Svetlov’s letter poses for the anti-ID community. There have been signs that the anti-ID folks want to back away from making publication in peer reviewed journals a touchstone of good science. Not a bad idea. But doing so affirms the likelihood that peer-reviewed journals have published some rubbish—maybe a good deal of it, as Svetlov asserts. And if that’s true, it diminishes the cultural authority that the science establishment has relied on to keep ID and criticisms of Darwinism out of public school science classrooms.

Anti-IDists seem to know this and are working both sides of the street. On the one hand, as I’ve noted elsewhere, they seem to be downplaying the importance and validity of peer review—but only to a limited extent. On the other hand, they’re still trying make it look as if Meyer’s paper was published only through chicanery—and therefore doesn’t count as a peer-reviewed article.

Strategically, this is probably the best thing they can do. But if some enterprising team of young scholars decided to document Svetlov’s claims—the way Jonathan Wells did on a smaller scale with biology textbook errors—the whole issue of ID and peer review could be rendered moot in the ensuing controversy.

Of course, this is just my speculation. But what if it really happened?

What if?

Submitted 10/26/2004

The Biological Society of Washington (BSW) has come up with a "new and improved" statement about the Stephen Meyer article that it published in its August 4, 2004 issue. The statement is reproduced below:

The paper by Stephen C. Meyer, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," in vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239 of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, was published at the discretion of the former editor, Richard v. Sternberg. Contrary to typical editorial practices, the paper was published without review by any associate editor; Sternberg handled the entire review process. The Council, which includes officers, elected councilors, and past presidents, and the associate editors would have deemed the paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings because the subject matter represents such a significant departure from the nearly purely systematic content for which this journal has been known throughout its 122-year history. For the same reason, the journal will not publish a rebuttal to the thesis of the paper, the superiority of intelligent design (ID) over evolution as an explanation of the emergence of Cambrian body-plan diversity. The Council endorses a resolution on ID published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (www.aaas.org/news/releases/2002/1106id2.shtml), which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity. Accordingly, the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings .

We have reviewed and revised editorial policies to ensure that the goals of the Society, as reflected in its journal, are clearly understood by all. Through a web presence (http://www.biolsocwash.org) and improvements in the journal, the Society hopes not only to continue but to increase its service to the world community of systematic biologists.

This statement mainly makes explicit what was implicit in the previous statement (though the president and current managing editor had been pretty explicit in their comments to the press). Since I covered the accusations against Sternberg in my previous Wedge Update, I won't rehash that material here.

Most interesting about the statement is the logic it employs. Near the end of the first paragraph it reads: "The Council endorses a resolution on ID published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ... which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity. Accordingly, the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings."

In other words, because a resolution by the AAAS board "observes" that there is "no credible scientific evidence" supporting intelligent design, the BSW has determined that Meyer's article "does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings." And that's despite the (apparently irrelevant) fact that three independent reviewers said it did. 1

It's also despite the fact that the AAAS resolution is a politically motivated document, put together by people who know relatively little about ID. Indeed, after the AAAS board initially released its resolution, the Discovery Institute's John West contacted board members by e-mail and found that the resolution was essentially based on a couple of books read by staffers and a few Web documents. The board members who responded indicated that they themselves had read nothing—except for one who said she’d read some stuff on the Web but couldn’t remember what it was. 2

These facts notwithstanding, the Council has announced that it has "reviewed and revised editorial policies," presumably to make sure that no paper like Meyer's is published in the journal again, no matter what its actual relevance or scientific merits.

Ironically, though, by publishing and then repudiating the Meyer paper, the BSW has done the seemingly impossible. Not only has it given ID proponents a publication in a peer-reviewed biology journal, it has also handed a smoking gun to those ID proponents who argue that the peer-review process is unfairly stacked against them.

Quite a feat for a single journal.

There's no telling how the controversy over Meyer's paper will shake out. But whether the anti-design camp wins or loses, the BSW has tarnished its image—not by publishing Meyer's paper, but by the bumbling, disingenuous way it has handled the fallout.

If I were them, I'd have to wonder: Was it really worth it?

###

1. Note: Some may claim that I am taking these last two sentences out of context. However, the previous sentences of the paragraph concern only the alleged "inappropriateness" of Meyer's article. That standard is also cited as the reason the journal will not run any rebuttals to the piece. Yet it's doubtful that the BSW would claim that such a rebuttal would fail to meet the scientific (as opposed to the relevancy) standards of the journal.

2. John West, personal communication.