Friday, December 23, 2005
Clarification on ID Letter
My letter to The Philosopher Magazine lacked an important nuance. The Discovery Institute folks (whom I generally endorse on the ID issue) only want the public schools to allow ID as a challenge to Darwinism. They do not want to mandate that both be taught, partially because ID is not an full-fledged theory as yet. This was one of the problems in the Dover case, which would have made a statement about ID mandatory in the classroom. That statement also refered to a book that may have not been the best for the public schools. The Discovery Institute was not behind the strategy used in the Dover case.
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ID is allowed under current law. All that is required is that the published research be used to back up the lesson plan and additions to curricula.
That has been the suggested law since the Arkansas decision in 1982, reified by the Supreme Court's decision on the issue in 1987.
All an ID advocate would need to do is collect the best 25 or so research articles published and combine them into a lesson plan.
No change in law is required for that.
So it rings a bit hollow when the Discovery Institute now claims that is all they seek.
The science journals typically freeze out ID articles (given the Darwinian orthodoxy), so it is very difficult to get anything published in peer review journals. However, there are a number of such publications, as the Discovery web site makes known. Moreover, peer review has its limits; it is not an absolute standard.
No, science journals don't "freeze out" ID articles. So far as anyone can tell, every ID article ever submitted has been published. Both of them.
Peer review does indeed have limits. Peer review cannot created research articles on ID that do not exist. ID advocates must do some research and actually submit it to journals. Behe can't, Dembski won't, no one else is trying.
The fault of ID is not in the stars, nor in the bias of journals: It is in the ID advocates' failure to do any science.
Where does Ed get the idea that all the ID submissions have been published? This is nonsense. Ask Behe. Moreover, the Discovery Institute has an annotated bibliography on more than two peer reviewed publications. Ed seems to be bluffing more than arguing.
I'll call your bluff: Ask Dr. Behe to send you a copy of any article on research he has ever submitted, supporting ID, that has not been published. There are none.
Look, this was litigated in 1981. Given the opportunity to produce, for the court, articles that had been rejected on creationism, creationists were completely unable to find a single such article.
It's still true. A creationist-leaning-though-denying-it editor sneaked one into a minor biology journal last year, and there is one other. But to the challenge of producing such articles for the record, IDists in Dover were no more successful than the other creationists in Arkansas in 1981.
Ask Behe? I have. He stated flat out that he has no such articles to submit, that he has no such research in the can or on the table.
Ask Behe yourself. Don't take my word for it. Go find the research that IDists claim hasn't been published. I dare you.
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