New blog on the kid
Be my - local or otherwise - editor, if you like! : Soyez mon éditeur local ou plus large, si vous voulez!
Et pour tous ceux qui voient ceci sur les ordis - que Sainte Claire prie pour vous!
Creationism, Science and Peer Review
Published: 2 February 2008 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/creationism-science-and-peer-review
Born in the 17th century, journal peer review is an extremely diverse technology, constantly torn between two often incompatible goals: the validation of manuscripts conceived as a collective industrial-like reproducible process performed to assert scientific statements, and the dissemination of articles considered as a means to spur scientific discussion, raising controversies, and civically challenging a state of knowledge.
Einstein stopped submitting work to the Physical Review after receiving a negative critique from the journal in response to a paper he had written with Rosen on gravitational waves later in 1936.2 That much has long been known, at least to the editors of Einstein’s collected papers. But the story of Einstein’s subsequent interaction with the referee in that case is not well known to physicists outside of the gravitational-wave community. Last March, the journal’s current editor-in-chief, Martin Blume, and his colleagues uncovered the journal’s logbook records from the era, a find that has confirmed the suspicions about that referee’s identity.3 Moreover, the story raises the possibility that Einstein’s gravitational-wave paper with Rosen may have been his only genuine encounter with anonymous peer review. Einstein, who reacted angrily to the referee report, would have been well advised to pay more attention to its criticisms, which proved to be valid.
Other examples, for instance in mammalian evolution and muscle crossbridge dynamics, were published with editors and referees suspecting that their conclusions were probably wrong but giving the papers the benefit of the doubt because there were no insurmountable technical objections and they seemed important. Such cases have proved stimulating for their fields, even though (in at least one case) the conclusions, as techniques have improved, have indeed required revision.
This is strikingly reminiscent of perhaps the most celebrated editorial judgements of all, in Annalen der Physik in1905. That was the year in which Einstein published five extraordinary papers in that journal, including special relativity and the photoelectric effect. The journal had a great editor in Max Planck. He recognized the virtue of publishing such outlandish ideas, but there was also a policy that allowed authors much latitude after their first publication. Indeed, in journals in those days, the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas. ...
One might also remember just how exceptional Nobel-winning discoveries tend to be.
By and large, peer-filtering has strong virtues.
After a lengthy debate over coffee, muffins and cantaloupe, French wrote, “it eventually came down to this. [My friend] looked at me and said, ‘Your beliefs are so dangerously obsolete, they should be silenced.’”
“You’re forgetting the small detail that conservatives have constitutional rights,” French shot back.
“The constitution,” her friend said coldly, “should be amended.”
Wrote French, “She ended the conversation and our friendship by saying she didn’t want to discuss this further because my status as a Christian meant I lacked the mental skills to have an intelligent debate. Her last words spoken to me were ‘You only believe in faith … not logic.’”
obsolete (adj.)
1570s, from Latin obsoletus "grown old, worn-out," past participle of obsolescere "fall into disuse, be forgotten about, become tarnished," which probably is from ob "away" (see ob-) + an expanded form of solere "to be used to, be accustomed" (see insolent).
