Only people that agree with OUR interpretation of reality need apply.If you look at evidence without OUR agenda,you are not qualified.Your real names will be changed so that your history of supporting OUR agenda in the face of truth so that you can be considerd acceptable to REAL scientific journals in order to get OUR foot in the door will be done on your behalf(and our cause)in order to fake OUR view of truth.Sounds like fraud.dishonesty deciet,and transparent manipulation to me.Why do these people have a problem with accepting truth?They go to these obviously transparent macinations and do not realize how it shines a light on their intellactually vapid way of THINKING.

Seriously.

You're the one promoting civilized intellectual discourse?

Oh, and as for the 'if you don't agree with us, don't publish here' - first, that has been part of journal culture since the beginning... and second, it thrives as a model in many of the humanities.

Even in the sciences, some journals are known to only be friendly to certain points of view - it was well known for a while that plate tectonics was unwelcome in geology, for example. Various new journals spring up when an existing one isn't receptive to a new field or branch.

That's a little different from what the AiG folks do. These people are nuts. They follow a philosophical doctrine called "presuppositionalism," whereby they knowingly, actively, proudly pre-suppose (this is their word!) that the bible is %100 literally true, and they assert that this presupposition is just as valid as the presupposition that beliefs should be based on evidence. They then actively, purposefully ignore and discard evidence that doesn't match with their conception of a young earth. Since they presuppose the earth is 10,000 years old, they believe any evidence to the contrary is wrong by definition.

It's not intellectual dishonesty. It's insanity.

It's different from geologists rejecting plate tectonics - their skepticism was probably well grounded. But the key is that as evidence in favor of the plate tectonics theory began to accumulate, the goelogical community changed their minds and accepted it. What sort of evidence do you suppose it would take to get Answers in Genesis to conclude the earth is over 10,000 years old? Literally all the evidence in the world thus far has not been enough.

Well, I'm not supporting the young earth concept - that would be problematic, I think. However, you should really look back on the history of plate tectonics, the outright disbelief, the careers ruined, the papers reviewed unfairly and so on. It was nearly as bad as the original church response to the heliocentric theory - and it was all scientists. There are other cases which are less notorious, usually because the debates are more arcane or more recent - russian genetic seems less willful because it was more driven by politics; some people would point to certain diseases and modern journals about them - Parkinsons, I think is one, and HIV therapy seems to be a closed community.

Helicobacter was another - when people claimed that ulcers were caused by an infection, they were shot down and shut up until finally they came back with such irrefutable evidence that they could silence their critics. The real problems occur when the new idea is rejected in a way that it can never get any voice or publication, and the people staunching the publications can thus keep the researchers from getting or keeping jobs... it is an ugly, ugly spiral that is regularly repeated, and not just by people this far outside the scientific world.

And arguably the plate-tectonics had very incomplete science behind it when it was first proposed. But a willingness to be wrong is part and parcel of scientific inquiry. Note, it isn't the annonymity of the submission process that itself is the problem, it is the combination of selective review AND annonymity that is the problem.

Why? Because in essence you have individuals who supposedly are following the "Scientific method", who's normal careers reward them for doing so, violating that method knowingly and seeking to hide from the consequences.

This is no different than pre-emptively invoking the term "political correctness" to avoid the adverse consequences of noxious speech.

Hey Degsme; wondered where you were off to.

I'm not sure that there is a huge problem here yet; eventually someone is going to say 'in a peer reviewed scientific journal' and cite a paper from here next to a paper from Microbial Ecology and one from Social Text - and then I'll have apoplexy, because it will imply that people from the same community (roughly) reviewed all three papers - while all three groups of reviewers would probably have major issues with that implication.

Still, Degsme, I wonder why you would have all professional scientists fired for composing operas, participating in LARP, giving their children quarters from the tooth fairy, and skiing?

After all, these activities are all more or less violations of the 'scientific method.' Nobody does any of them via the scientific method, and using the scientific method would be exceptionally painful while skiing. What idiot repeatedly crashes into the trees, just to make sure they have negative controls?

No, no ... what you have a problem with is that you want to punish people for participating in certain kinds of religion, and particularly so if they profit from a high status profession that seems incompatible (to you) with that religion. Naughty naughty! How intolerant of you! =P

There is a difference between skiing through the trees (you are right, only idiots like Sonny Bono crash into trees, the rest of us avoid them) and 'scientific method' - and I full well suspect you know what the difference is here. The difference is that an academic (or scientist) engaged in academic pursuits is essentially still operating within their professional field. And since part of an academics/scientists value to an employer is the integrity of reputation they enjoy, anything that might endanger that reputation is a valid reason for dismissal.

So while there is a question of free speech and free practice of religion, the individuals in question essentially voluntarily offered to trade some of those freedoms for the $$$ that they get from their employer. You and I make similar tradeoffs. There are lots of cool digital technologies I could write about, opinions that I could publically express that would affect my employer and my reputations sufficiently that I would lose my job. I know this, and I knew this going in. My continued employment vs. being able to use my own name in forums like these is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

What is going on with these authors is essentially the same thing that is going on with me when I use a NIC like degsme. It allows me to express OPINION without having the consequences bite my wallet in the ass.

that's fine on things like personal opinions of politics. Its a different matter when one is claiming to engage in public advancement of objective knowledge.

BTW in terms of citing these sort of "journals" - take a look at how circularly the "Fair Tax" appologists cite Beacon Hill Institute papers as "peer reviewed", when the only review is by other Beacon Hill members. Add this to the behaviour of the ID folks and the outcome is fairly foreordained.

Well, there are a bunch of things to deal with here. One is academic freedom. I know that tenure is under attack, but I presume that your employment is not as a tenured faculty, or even 'in training for tenure' as it were. The academy is not supposed to fire people for their honest opinions expressed openly; and that's part of the tradeoff. Academicians don't make much money in part because they can't be told to keep their mouths shut. Their work is at best difficult to make classified, and not supposed to be silenced for commercial purposes. You - and I do mean you in particular - are attacking this.

I understand the need for some institutions to regulate their own academies - for instance, the Roman Church can authorize or de-authorize theologians to teach in its name - but that's a relatively narrow sort of thing and only applies to some institutions. Do we really suggest that our secular institutions have become so dogmatically religious that they actually want to authorize secular doctrines to which their faculty must adhere?

This takes us into Hitchens-land, an ugly place well down the rabbit hole.

As much as I hate admitting it, there can be scientific research under the banner of creationism/ID--even highly technical and somewhat PERSUASIVE science (polonium halos come to mind).

And it IS painful thinking of people who were relegated for being RIGHT; Barbara McClintock and transposition in corn and Stanley Prusiner for scrapie/prions are two examples that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the fray.

Still, I can't imagine anything USEFUL arising from creationists being able to claim that their creation (or is that Creation?) work is published in a "peer" reviewed "scientific" journal.

Hehehe, I think they'll end up hanging themselves with their new rope :)

The fact is, though, anyone with the money can start any journal they please, with any rules for article publication that strikes their fancy.

Firing for opinions (and you are correct, I do not work in academe, I work in an "at will" state) is contrary to academic independence. That said indepenence of opinion is not the same as independence of competence. And the inability to consistently apply scientific method would very much bring competence into question.

So the obverse of your question

Do we really suggest that our secular institutions have become so dogmatically religious that they actually want to authorize secular doctrines to which their faculty must adhere?

Is

Do we really think so poorly of scientific method and technical qualifications, that we will let any sort of incompetence in the field of research be covered under the ubiquitous excuse of "personal opinion".

After all Hwang Woo-suk only followed his independent opinions right? How is the abandonment of the Null Hypothesis approach to evidentiary analysis any different than what Woo-Suk did?

Science always has to be open to new evidence, like "polonium halos" or whatever. But so far all of this stuff has been debunked pretty comprehensively pretty fast. (It takes about ten seconds Googling to come up with lots of problems with "polonium halos".)

If the AIG crowd cared about science, or for that matter if they cared about really finding evidence for Creation, they'd submit these theories to normal journals. But they have to ring-fence the "evidence" because this "research" is being done entirely for political purposes.

They are of course free to splash around in their bathtub, but the dubious political purposes they use this stuff for have to be monitored and challenged.

NB: Please don't think I'm a polonium halo salesman--hardly. I just wanted to give SOME example better than side-by-side dinosaur and human footprints :)

ID has done NO science so far. If they'd like to try to do a little, I say let them. As I meant to imply with my rope/hanging statement, I think they will quickly find after they roll up their sleeves that there's VERY LITTLE they can really do. In another thread I've tried to give my reasons why it would be VERY difficult for them to reject any meaninful null hypothesis of anything they worked on.

Malarkey:

That's a little different from what the AiG folks do. These people are nuts. They follow a philosophical doctrine called "presuppositionalism," whereby they knowingly, actively, proudly pre-suppose (this is their word!) that the bible is %100 literally true, and they assert that this presupposition is just as valid as the presupposition that beliefs should be based on evidence. They then actively, purposefully ignore and discard evidence that doesn't match with their conception of a young earth. Since they presuppose the earth is 10,000 years old, they believe any evidence to the contrary is wrong by definition.

It's not intellectual dishonesty. It's insanity.

It's different from geologists rejecting plate tectonics - their skepticism was probably well grounded. But the key is that as evidence in favor of the plate tectonics theory began to accumulate, the goelogical community changed their minds and accepted it. What sort of evidence do you suppose it would take to get Answers in Genesis to conclude the earth is over 10,000 years old? Literally all the evidence in the world thus far has not been enough.

I have no problem with even Dr. FrankenSteen doing science. And I agree that if the actually roll up their sleeves and try to do real science, they will find there is little for them to do.

But that is precisely why teaching ID in schools - as BenK suggests would be OK - as a "scientific theory" on par with evolutionary theory is simply teaching religion and belief and not science.

Yet that is precisely what the Discovery Institute seeks to do. Their "briefing packet for educators" on ID scaffolds on Science's identification of DI as "The Nation's leading Intelligent Design Think Tank". This is a classic "guilt by association" and "appeal to higher authority" proof fallacy.

Yet in essence that is what the goal of the Answers Research Journal seeks to do. By getting cited in mainstream scientific media, and through the use of circular and self-referential citations, they will create the illusion that science was being done in this area. When really it is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Oh, I agree: Nothing is more appalling to me than teaching in public schools the idea that ID is a fair alternative to evolution.

But as far as the "intentions" or "results" of starting up the journal "Answers in Research,"....there's nothing to be done.

You don't want have a special injunction that obviates the first amendment just for creationists, do you degsme?