quote:
That quote is from this article: Creationism, Science and Peer Review - creation.com
The article just sheds some light on the censorship of creationism and the peer review process. instead of me quoting the whole article (i've read it) if someone wants to pick something from it and discuss it, cool. Or at the bottom of thaqt article are other ones also.
It seems fair (the article). This is how I feel about the situation. Creationists are a joke to a lot of people and no matter what they do won't ever be published. That why they created their own, which are good. I get the info bites from CMI. It's probabnly my favorite site along with Biblical creation.
Of course the article is heavily biased.
For instance:
Apart from the glaring inconsistencies in this line of argument (if young-earth research should only be taken seriously if it passes the peer-review of non young-earth scientists, then shouldn’t old-earth research only be taken seriously if it passes the peer-review of young-earth scientists? Are the ‘peers’ of old-earth scientists not also proponents of an old earth? Would this not cast serious doubt on the validity of their research?),
The simple point is that articles arguing for a radical reinterpretation of the evidence (and a Young Earth view IS a radical reinterpretation of the evidence) need to pass review by people who are not heavily biased in favour of it. There is no such need for papers assuming an old Earth because it is the mainstream view already. There is no inconsistency there at all. The article assumes a false inconsistency.
Proponents of young-earth creationism are not the only scientists who have experienced this kind of discrimination. Scientists that reject the commonly asserted ‘consensus’ view of climate change (that the earth is abnormally warming as a result of human-caused carbon emissions) are routinely derided in the popular media as ‘pseudoscientists’, ‘heretics’, ‘on the payroll of the big multinationals’ or as having the moral credit of a holocaust denier. In fact, these modern ideological disagreements and debates mirror many scientific debates that have occurred throughout history.
This simply reveals that the author is biased against climate change. There are good reasons why anti-climate change papers get rejected...
It is also rather biased about the role of the media, failing to point out that support for climate change denial may also be found there...
And then he goes on to claim that the quote including this is evidence of bias against creationism:
I would go even further, in fact. The collection of creationist ideas (6,000 year old earth, no common ancestry, all the fossils laid down by Noah's flood, Genesis creation account read literally, etc.) has been so thoroughly discredited by both scientific and religious scholarship that I think it is entirely appropriate for Research News to print material designed to move our readers away from this viewpoint.
Let us note that the quote here is from a Christian (Karl Giberson) referring to his work editing a publication described as:
"...a new 36-page monthly international newspaper that publishes the latest research findings, funding opportunities, and interesting discussions on the relationship between religion, science, and health. "
here NOT a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Let us note also that some arguments do not even support the claim.
n fact, in many cases, even reviewers lack consensus in regard to the validity of specific research. Ewen and Pusztai’s research on the effects of feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats was reviewed by both the Royal Society and leading medical journal The Lancet. All six Royal Society reviewers pronounced the research ‘flawed,’ yet five out of six of The Lancet’s reviewers judged that the research should be published. As Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, asks: ‘[H]ow can two (reasonably) well-regarded organisations peer review the same work and yet come to such radically opposite conclusions about its validity ?
What the article fails to adequately stress is that rejections are common and that it is hardly unusual for a paper to be submitted to a number of journals, one after the other. If opinions really are so divided than solid creationist work should be able to find an outlet.
To really prove that rejection of creationist work is motivated solely by prejudice we need to see good creationist work that has been through the cycles of multiple submissions to appropriate journals and been rejected each time. But we never see that. The quality of YEC work is simply assumed to be good enough that it should be automatically published despite the massive problems of the YEC viewpoint.