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To: Bonaparte
f you read my post again, you will see that I did not allude to peer review per se, only to those journals whose editorial bias has resulted in denial of publication to Behe and other ID theorists, often without explanation.

What you wrote was this:
And what is considered "peer review," Doctor? The refusal to review by the very journals controlled by ID's adversaries and neo-Darwinism's allies?

Unfortunately, that is indeed what most of us consider peer review. Scholarly monographs are not subjected to the same kind of review as books.

And there is no way I would make such a sweeping statement, since I'm well aware of professional journals that have accepted articles by ID theorists, for example, The Journal of Theoretical Biology. Consult PubMed or SciSearch and you'll find others.

Well, I just did, and you'll have to help me here. I used SciFinder, a very comprehensive database that I happen to be able to access from my deskrop. I searched for intelligent design as a literal phrase. I got 50 hits, but most were nothing to do with ID as we're discussing it. Of those that were relevant, one was a book review of a compilation of arguments for and against ID, and one was a computer science paper in a preprint archive (by definition, this hasn't yet made it past peer review); that one didn't seem to take a position on evolution (it was an analysis of biological system complexity). And that was it.

I got 507 hits on the concept 'intelligent design'; a scan of the first 100 or so turned up the two previous hits and none others, so I concluded this wasn't the mother lode, either.

I have scanned under Behe's name too. I found his 'regular' scientific work, and one polemic on ID, but that was it.

So here I'm stuck. You say ID has a measurable peer reviewed impact in biology. I say as far as I can tell, it hasn't resulted in any significant number of peer reviewed publications in biology or biological chemistry at all. From my perspective, it's the fringest of fringe ideas; it's the product of small number of mathematicians who have notably failed to have any impact on the field they're supposedly interested in. Looked at from a non-theistic perspective, why would we even consider teaching this in high-school?

162 posted on 10/17/2002 8:43:21 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
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To: Right Wing Professor
. Scholarly monographs are not subjected to the same kind of review as books.

Books are probably subjected to much stronger review than scientific journals. Nobody reads that darned stuff and if a person can find a hungry journal that needs an article, they can get it published regardless of how silly it is and get away with it. However, books are reviewed in many different places - including in scientific journals. While all the reviewers may not be scientists in the field, many are usually selected to write the review because they do have a knowledge of the field. I have seen for example many reviews of Behe's "Black Box' by many people in the sciences. In fact, one of the large academic presses was going to publish Behe's book, but the money was less than where he finally published it at Simon and Shuster which is itself not a craddle of conservatism.

212 posted on 10/17/2002 6:18:55 PM PDT by gore3000
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