#44783: — 10/20  at  06:24 AM
In this case 'peer reviewed' also means 'crank reviewed'.

#44785: — 10/20  at  06:42 AM

Behe agreed, when asked by plaintiff’s counsel Eric Rothschild if the "peer review for Darwin’s Black Box was analogous to peer review in the [scientific] literature." It was, according to Behe, even more rigorous.

Yes, indeed - the work done to ensure that the reviewers had the right anti-science stance was quite rigorous.

#44786: — 10/20  at  06:52 AM
But were there any REAL reviewers who told the publisher that the book was a stinking pile that shouldn't be published? Now that would be an interesting thing to get into on the witness stand.

#44792: — 10/20  at  07:45 AM
PWN, verb t.

to beat or dominate an opponent (pwned can mean "to be made a fool of")

#44793: — 10/20  at  07:48 AM
Well, spending 10 minutes talking about the book probably is more rigorous peer-review than the ID's version of "science" usually involves.

(Off topic: the best use of "pwned" I've seen is in the comic strip DFMA, where it was incorporated into the punch sound effect "kapwned!")

#44796: — 10/20  at  07:55 AM

...Behe agreed, when asked by plaintiff's counsel Eric Rothschild if the "peer review for Darwin's Black Box was analogous to peer review in the [scientific] literature." It was, according to Behe, even more rigorous...

I guess that explains how the Behe & Snokes article got into Protein Science.

#44798: coturnix — 10/20  at  08:01 AM
As with every other term and concept, ID Creationists also redefined "peer review".

#44800: — 10/20  at  08:08 AM
Heh pwned! ID i5 t3h sUx!

/1337 ^^45+3r!!1!

#44805: — 10/20  at  08:23 AM
Re: "pwnage"

You're scaring me, PZ. Starting to sound like my WoW guildies. Gonna come join us on Thunderhorn?

For the Horde!

#44806: — 10/20  at  08:26 AM
Go to http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9902/atchison.html to read Atchison's full description of his "review" of DBB and good self-description of Atchison and his perspective on science.

Keanus

#44808: — 10/20  at  08:35 AM
Wow, Keanus. I sure as hell hope the plaintiff's attorneys managed to get that into the record somehow. So much for the "non-religious" character of this sham.

#44810: — 10/20  at  08:50 AM
Actually, the plaintiffs' attorney did enter that article into the record and directly confronted Behe about it on the stand. Check the ACLU blog on the trial, currently the second posting from the top:
http://www.aclupa.blogspot.com/

#44811: — 10/20  at  09:03 AM
<blockquote>“We spent approximately 10 minutes on the phone. After hearing a description of the work, I suggested that the editor should seriously consider publishing the manuscript. <b>I told him that the origin of life</b> issue was still up in the air. It sounded like this Behe fellow might have some good ideas, although I could not be certain since I had never seen the manuscript.”</blockquote>

Two things…first, origin of life and origin of species are two different beasts. When people apply Darwin’s origins of species to origins of life is like applying Newtonian mechanics to sub-atomic particles.

Second, I bet the good Dr. Achtison owns some prime swampland in Florida...site unseen.

#44817: — 10/20  at  09:30 AM
Thanks rrt, you just made my day.

#44824: — 10/20  at  10:14 AM
WTFPWNED! ROFLMAOTTYLBBQ!!!1!11!!1!shift+won!!1!

Seriously, Atchinson is a biochemistry professor? How terrible an education must his U-Penn students be receiving?

#44834: — 10/20  at  11:08 AM
In reply to Fatmop:
He's a prof at the Vet school. I expect that this would be very much like Med school, where the biochemistry course would be a survey course, a massive amount of information piled onto already overloaded first year students. Not what I would call a great education in any case.
However, I wonder about any grad students or post-docs...

#44841: — 10/20  at  12:16 PM

A. Well, the publisher of the book, Free Press, sent it out to be -- sent the manuscript out to be read prior to publication by five scientists.

…Behe agreed, when asked by plaintiff's counsel Eric Rothschild if the "peer review for Darwin's Black Box was analogous to peer review in the [scientific] literature." It was, according to Behe, even more rigorous. There were more than twice standard the number of reviewers and "they read [the book] more carefully…because this was a controversial topic."

Hmmm, now why would a publisher ask for peer review from "more than twice the standard number" of reviewers? Could it be because some of the original reviewers turned thumbs down? "More than twice" - "five" - Maybe there were two thumbs up, two thumbs down, and Atchinson was the tie-breaker. Yet Behe turns it into a bragging point.

#44847: Scott Spiegelberg — 10/20  at  12:46 PM
To Basseyian Bouffant's comment, I would also add that in my experience, the standard number of reviewers for an article is three. This removes the problems of a tie. Plus Atchinson never read the book, so he really cannot be counted as a reviewer, more as an (unqualified) consultant on general attitudes towards "origins of life" in the scientific community. The editor made a bad choice, and not a rigorous one, in asking Atchinson's opinion.

#44853: — 10/20  at  01:22 PM
I wish I could see this in the newspaper. The Idaho Statesman was pretty quiet on the ID trial until posting two consecutive articles on Behe's testimony (and not his cross-examination). I thought they had made a mistake and were reprinting the first one again, but no, it was the Chicago Tribune's blurb on the second day of Behe's testimony, saying basically the same thing as the first article, from the AP. Real Scientist With Degrees And All Sez There's Design In the World! Feh.

#44854: — 10/20  at  01:24 PM

The editor made a bad choice, and not a rigorous one, in asking Atchinson's opinion.

I'm sure it was a profitable one, though!

#44867: — 10/20  at  02:32 PM
Behe is such a n00btart. Pure pwnage!!!11eleventyone!

And rrt -- Scarlet Crusade here.

#44869: — 10/20  at  02:56 PM

And rrt -- Scarlet Crusade here.

Oooh. An RPer, no less. =)

#44896: — 10/20  at  08:44 PM
What's with Biochemists and Chemist being Creationists? There's this Atchison guy and Behe. And then there's that Chemist Phil Skell. Is there something about chemistry that breeds creationism?

#44898: PZ Myers — 10/20  at  09:07 PM
I think it's because traditional chemistry completely lacks a historical component, so one can get a good education in it yet lack any experience with historical sciences, like evolutionary biology and some branches of physics. It doesn't equip them to handle the concepts.

#44910: — 10/21  at  04:31 AM
In defense of chemists:

Bullshit! One (or even a few) nutters do not a pattern make.

The concepts behind the historical sciences are not beyond anyone without a predetermined commitment to deliberately not understand them. Evolutionary biology is not especially difficult to grasp. There is nothing special about chemistry or biochemistry that distinguishes them from say maths or engineering in terms of "creationistogenic ability". The whole anti-evolution movement is built on ignorance of the relevant science. To be a good chemist in certain fields of chemistry (say physical or inorganic) you need never encounter evolutionary biology, or even just biology, at all. The only reason the nutter fringe in ANY discipline can get away with some of the ridiculous pronouncements they come out with is precisely because the nutter fringe is ignorant of the relevant science outside of their field. Inferring that chemists as a whole are ill equipped by virtue of their field to cope with evolutionary ideas is a fallacy analogous to me saying that more physicists will be homeopaths because they don't often deal with concepts like molarity and mechanism of drug action.

The point of this part is that the anti-evolution movement thrives only on ignorance of the relevant science. Highly educated people from outside the relevant fields are capable of being ignorant of the relevant science, as indeed is the average geezer in the street. The problem being is that occasionally (humans being humans) someone who is successful in one field assumes this success and ability translates across, simply on their own say so. It rarely does!

To be a good organic chemist, especially a synthetic organic chemist who deals with either natural products chemisty or medicinal chemistry in particular, ignorance of biology is not only a handicap, it's a deal breaker. You know no biology? You're fucked! You want a nice big pharmaceutical company pay cheque? Better bone up on your biology my man! You want a decent academic post and lost of grant cash? Look to the "interfaces" between the "disciplines" of biology and chemistry and physics and chemistry. These are where the exciting ideas are at the moment.

Evolutionary biology is highly relevant to a full understanding of chemistry in nature. How a biochemist can get away with it is beyond me. I can only imagine Behe and people like him stick their fingers in their ears and scream "lalalalala" whilst wearing a blindfold. The evidence is simply too huge.

As for chemistry lacking a historical component, it's hard to know where to take that. In one sense, who do you think worked out how to do radiometric dating analysis? Analytical and physical chemists that's who! How about stellar evolution? Nucleogenesis? Astrochemistry? These things have the same sort of historical components found in evolutionary biology. You are looking at the products of long processes and deriving the mechanisms of those processes.

In another sense, chemistry that occurs on HUGE timescales (i.e. has incredibly tiny rates of reaction) is only of minor relevance to the more rapid processes occuring around us, so yes, the historical component is practically irrelevant to that aspect of chemistry.

However, that's not to say that a "historical" mindset is not present in these sorts of studies. For example in molecular dynamics and the derivation of reaction mechanisms, some processes occur so fast that you can only infer a mechanism from their products. This is not unlike an evolutionary scenario in which you only have the end results of complex processes (fossils, modern genetic data etc) and you are trying to tease out a mechanism or path. The timescales are different, but the mechanisms are no less impenetrable. In fact much of the chemistry of reaction transition states suffers from this "historical" issue.

The one caveat to this is that we can get (and are getting) better and faster spectroscopy to penetrate these ultrafast processes, within limits, and thus actually see facets of their mechanism. This technological insight is not possible with evolutionary timescales for the obvious reasons.