Intelligent Design and Peer Review

Discovery Institute ^ | November 1, 2003 | William A. Dembski

[RightWingNilla]

ping

[PatrickHenry]

PING. [This ping list is for the evolution side of evolution threads, and sometimes for other science topics. FReepmail me to be added or dropped.]

[js1138]

That's pretty scary. But you only got the firewall, not the server. Only a flesh wound.

[LiteKeeper]

YEC SPOTREP

[donh]

It is true that Cambridge University Press officially lists this book as a philosophy monograph. But why should how the book is listed by its publisher be relevant to deciding whether it does or does not contain genuine scientific content?

Well now, there's a puzzler, let me think. I guess "Winnie-the-Poo" COULD be a scientific monograph--who's to say?

Darwin's little book wasn't a peer-reviewed scientific paper, but the gutwad of peer-reviewed research that followed on it's heals was, and established evolutionary theory as an integral part of biological science. Where's the equivalent for Dembski's book?

Yet another bait&switch arguement brought to you by the ever-predictable Discovery Institute.

[metacognative]

The Scientific Establishment's peer review is like the Medieval Church College of Cardinals. Heretics are not listened to and apostates are excommunicated.

[Dimensio]

I grabbed the pic via Lynx. It couldn't figure out my operating system or my browser type, just my IP address and ISP.

[ThinkPlease]

The Scientific Establishment's peer review is like the Medieval Church College of Cardinals. Heretics are not listened to and apostates are excommunicated.

If that were the case, do you think any ID paper would have been published. Methinks you are overstating just a tad.

[PatrickHenry]

In this article by Dembski: Becoming a Disciplined Science: Prospects, Pitfalls, and Reality Check for ID, he makes several interesting statements:

We have done amazingly well in creating a cultural movement, but we must not exaggerate ID's successes on the scientific front. ... An intellectual movement cannot sustain itself on media attention. ... Because of ID's outstanding success at gaining a cultural hearing, the scientific research part of ID is now lagging behind.

One of the marks of a disciplined science is that it possesses an easily accessible catalog of fundamental facts. Think of the magnificent star cluster catalogs in astrophysics. ID needs something like this.

Intelligent design as a scientific and intellectual project has many sympathizers but few workers. The scholarly side of our movement at this time consists of a handful of academics and independent researchers.

A problem we now face with intelligent design is that even if the educational mainstream opened its arms to us (don't hold your breath), we have no sustained course of study to give them.

[RightWingNilla]

The Scientific Establishment's peer review is like the Medieval Church College of Cardinals. Heretics are not listened to and apostates are excommunicated.

This really isnt true. Scientific "dogma" is overturned surprisingly quite often(provided the evidence is reproducable and convincing enough). The discovery of reverse transcriptase in the late 60's is a good example of this. Experiments using retroviruses overturned the central dogma of molecular biology on its head in a matter of months.

[VadeRetro]

**Scott’s charge that critics of Darwinian evolution, like me and my colleagues at Discovery Institute, “misquote” or “quote-mine” the work of scientists has degenerated into a slogan.

Discovery's quote-scholarship is fully worthy of its creationist roots: abolutely scummy. Perhaps you recall going over these charges in detail when Discovery Institute tried to rebut NCSE over DI's presentation to the Ohio Dept. of Education.

Dembski trying to claim that nothing is going on here, that DI is anything but a propaganda mill for an activist movement (while accusing the rest of the world of what they are doing) is just ludicrous.

[VadeRetro]

A problem we now face with intelligent design is that even if the educational mainstream opened its arms to us (don't hold your breath), we have no sustained course of study to give them.

But they want into the high schools anyway to tell the kids the sustained course of study they will get is all wrong.

[f.Christian]

We have the rat nest republicans science ... evolution only --- one size force fits all !

[Doctor Stochastic]

From the Abstract:

Multiple interdependent patterns when consistently observed from analyzing biomolecular sequences can be a powerful indication
in discovering underlying knowledge of the sequences. However, such network of interdependent patterns can be difficult to
analyze or interpret. To simplify the complexity of the pattern analysis task while taking advantage of the richness from this
representation, a characterization we refer to as consigned interdependency is proposed to describe the extracted complex patterns.
Specifically, given a data sequence ensemble, suppose the interdependencies between all the units of the sequences can be extracted
forming a network linking between the interdependent units of the sequences. By consigned interdependency, we refer to the
detected interdependency when the network of statistical interdependencies among the ensemble are "transferred" to a subset of
relations, variables or attribute Values. We focus here on the third type of characterization pattern when multiple significant
statistical interdependencies are transferred to a subset of values in the data ensemble. Three experiments are performed to evaluate
the relevance of this characterization for pattern discovery. To evaluate some properties of the identified values, they are compared
to those in high-order event patterns. To evaluate the usefulness of such consigned values as inputs for cluster analysis, a
comparison using two architectures of self-organizing maps is performed. Finally, to evaluate the detected consigned values for
pattern analysis, a comparison of the values to existing knowledge in the literature is performed on data of a cancer-related protein
known as p53 protein. We found that interesting patterns are reflected from the proposed characterization.

[RightWingNilla]

We have done amazingly well in creating a cultural movement, but we must not exaggerate ID's successes on the scientific front

Successes? I can't even find a single paper (peer reviewed or otherwise) on medline.

[f.Christian]

" I'll believe in evolution when my desire alone for a whole lot of money is enough to be matched by an anonymous spontaneus billion dollar deposit in my checking account "

paraphase quote of gore3000 !

Isn't that liberalism ... money trees - magic ---- wishfull reality - thinking ?

" Fortuitous " ... lucky chance any thing is possible madness !

[PatrickHenry]

Successes? I can't even find a single paper (peer reviewed or otherwise) on medline.

Well, that's the kind of thing they don't want to exaggeate.