Why creationist can't pass peer review

[Matthewj1985]

I have asked here before why creationist simply refuse to submit their work to (real) peer reviewed journals and the answer I almost always hear is that the evil evolutionist will reject them because they hate God and don't want the truth to get out. Of course I and other "evolutionist" (aka, people who understand the theory) know that the real reason is that a good number of the professional creationist are simply intellectually dishonest. A great example would be this video done by Janet Folger and then debunked by a youtuber. Please not that Janet never cites sources and relies on using fake titles (calling Kent Hovind "Dr." even thought he has yet to receive ANY degree from an acredited university) to get her point across but the gentleman debunking the video cites all his sources.

Why do you guys insist that you are the ones practicing "real" science and yet every single video like this gets debunked by students on the web. Now I would be a little leary if the debunking videos didn't contain citations but they do. The only creationist I have ever seen use citations was Hovind and if you actually follow them, you realize how intelectually dishonest he is. Anyways, here is the REAL reason you guys have such a hard time working in the realm of actual science.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=70CB18A58FA47421

 

[Biblewriter]

I do't know about the "hate God and don't want the truth to get out" part, but the real reason that neither creationists or advocates of "intelligent desugn" can get their work peer approved is because the bulk of the scientific community is so prejudiced against any concept even remotely resembling the idea of a God that they automatically reject anything containing such an idea as "unscientific."

In my university days I wrote a paper that my (evolutionist) Ph. D. Professor called "one of the best, if not the best paper I have received in my twenty year's teaching experience." This paper contained citation of every fact used. And the sources were not "creationist" writings, but documentation from widely accepted scientific research reports. But I would be surprised if my paper were published in any scientific journal.

 

[shernren]

I do't know about the "hate God and don't want the truth to get out" part, but the real reason that neither creationists or advocates of "intelligent desugn" can get their work peer approved is because the bulk of the scientific community is so prejudiced against any concept even remotely resembling the idea of a God that they automatically reject anything containing such an idea as "unscientific."

Really? Between Stephen Hawking's infamous "mind of God" chapter that closed off A Brief History of Time and prominent theistic scientists like Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins, I'm not sure how viable your thesis is.

Or take Paul Davies. His books regularly feature some kind of a theistic conclusion - not to the extent of a God who came and died on the cross for us, no, but certainly some kind of a controlling supernatural intelligence above and outside creation. Does he get flak from atheists for it? Sure he does. Does he get flak from fellow physicists? He's been criticized by no less than Lee Smolin (who himself is hardly conventional, being one of the few vocal critics of string theory).

Does he get published in peer-reviewed journals? Whenever he has something interesting to say about physics, yes.

Do creationists get published in peer-reviewed journals? Sure they do. And Matthewj, you're going to have to accept that. Take for example:

Sanford, J.C., Baumgardner, J., Gibson, P., Brewer, W., ReMine, W. (2007). Using computer simulation to understand mutation accumulation dynamics and genetic load. In Shi et al. (Eds.), ICCS 2007, Part II, LNCS 4488 (pp.386-392), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg.

This was the International Conference on Computational Science, by the way, not some quirky creationist drum session. And between Sanford, Baumgardner, and good old Walter ReMine, more than half (and possibly all) of the authors of this paper are creationists. In fact, I myself am pretty excited to go read this paper (once I find the time to go hunt it down).

In my university days I wrote a paper that my (evolutionist) Ph. D. Professor called "one of the best, if not the best paper I have received in my twenty year's teaching experience." This paper contained citation of every fact used. And the sources were not "creationist" writings, but documentation from widely accepted scientific research reports. But I would be surprised if my paper were published in any scientific journal.

See, now that's unkind. I would be surprised too, but that's simply because (I expect) most journals get a whole lot more papers than they can publish. I'm running an optics research project and while my supervisor says I might be able to get a paper out, I'm skeptical. You need clout to be published and that sociological fact has little to do with creationism and evolutionists' skepticism of it.

Seriously though, why not try to get it published? Go email it to some biology professor or something.

I have asked here before why creationist simply refuse to submit their work to (real) peer reviewed journals and the answer I almost always hear is that the evil evolutionist will reject them because they hate God and don't want the truth to get out. Of course I and other "evolutionist" (aka, people who understand the theory) know that the real reason is that a good number of the professional creationist are simply intellectually dishonest. A great example would be this video done by Janet Folger and then debunked by a youtuber. Please not that Janet never cites sources and relies on using fake titles (calling Kent Hovind "Dr." even thought he has yet to receive ANY degree from an acredited university) to get her point across but the gentleman debunking the video cites all his sources.

Why do you guys insist that you are the ones practicing "real" science and yet every single video like this gets debunked by students on the web. Now I would be a little leary if the debunking videos didn't contain citations but they do. The only creationist I have ever seen use citations was Hovind and if you actually follow them, you realize how intelectually dishonest he is. Anyways, here is the REAL reason you guys have such a hard time working in the realm of actual science.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=70CB18A58FA47421

Most AiG articles have pretty interesting lists of citations.

Creationists are more often than not scientifically wrong, that's true enough. But there are plenty of reasons for them to not be able to make a mark in academia (many of which don't even occur to them), and quite frankly I find their academic silence to be quite irrelevant.

Creationism just doesn't work. The fact that some scientists don't like it is just icing on the cake for me.

 

[Sphinx777]

Peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish; and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Although generally considered essential to academic quality, peer review has been criticized as ineffective, slow, and misunderstood.

Pragmatically, peer review refers to the work done during the screening of submitted manuscripts and funding applications. This process encourages authors to meet the accepted standards of their discipline and prevents the dissemination of irrelevant findings, unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations, and personal views. Publications that have not undergone peer review are likely to be regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals.

 

[Biblewriter]

Peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field....This process encourages authors to meet the accepted standards of their discipline and prevents the dissemination of irrelevant findings, unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations, and personal views. Publications that have not undergone peer review are likely to be regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals.

This is why Creationists cannot pass peer review in any paper that treats of evolutionaly "science." Since the truth of evolutionn is a basic starting point, anything that questions it does not "Meet the accepted standards of their discipline" and is considered irrelevant, unwarranted, an unacceptable interpretation, or a personal view.

 

[70x7]

Are you asking a "creationist" to attempt to re-inact Gods design and then present it to a panel of man-made judges to review in order to thumbs up or thumbs down?
Evolution gets only so far before it runs out of answers (remember that chart you put up not too long ago?) it showed the division of bacteria but ultimatley, which should be the solid evidence, no development of the FIRST bacterium. Major flaw in the "proof". In effect, that leads your science to merely be a theory as well. Creation is our "theory".
A big difference is that your reference books change supporting evidence every semester while ours has remained unchanged for thousands of years!

 

[Biblewriter]

Creationism just doesn't work. The fact that some scientists don't like it is just icing on the cake for me.

The reason such comments are accepted in Physics publications and mathematical publications is that these are pure sciences, with very little opinion involved (actually, opinion is basically a no-no.)

Mathematicians and physicists are the sciences where the largest number of disbelievers in evolution occur, because, when considered mathetically, evolution simply doesn't work.

The paper I spoke of was a mathematical examination of one field critical to the advance of evolutionary development. It was a review of observed mutations in the fruit fly to find any that conferred a reproductive advantage to those individuals that had the mutation. I found one claim that such a mutation had once been observed, and I reported it, but stated that this was dismissed as hearsay because the article did not give any details about the allegedly observed mutation.

The actual data gleaned from the available published material was 5000 observed mutations, with 90% lethal, and with 90% ot the non-lethal mutations obviously crippling. But without even one that conferred an obvious advantage.

Statistically, this data yeilds the conclusion that there is no greater than a 50% probability that the ratio of beneficial mutations to detrimental mutations exceeds one in ten thousand. But the available data does not yeild any information as to how much smaller the ration might be. It only tells us that there is no more than a 50% probability that it is any greater than one in ten thousand. But since mutations normally occur only about once in ten thousand reproductions, this means that the chance that a benificial mutation will occur in a given reproduction is some unknown amount less that one in one hundred million.

Data that has emerged since my university days has dmonstrated that the concept of a beneficial mutation is a statistical monstrosity, probably millions of times, and perhaps even billions of times smaller than my data indicated. When we realize the complexity of the genetic code, we realize that the chances that a random change in that code could improve it are somewhere between nil and zero.

Yet evolution absolutely requires that this has happened again and again, numberless times, in every species on the earth today.

In Darwin's day it was reasonable to assume that "chance variations" were "naturally selected." But now we know that these chance variations will essentially always be destructive.

The chance that a random change in a DNA molecule will improve its performance is significantly less that the chance that a random change in a computer program will improve its performance. When we realize the extremely small probability that such a random change will actually improve the gene, we realize that even the billions of years assumed to be the age of the earth is not long enough to have had enough reproductions to have produced the trillions of beneficial mutations required.

 

[laptoppop]

Matthew, I find it increasingly annoying that you find it necessary to title all your threads in an insulting manner. There are enough threads around here on both sides of the issues done that way. I encourage everyone to raise the standard of our discourse into loving honest respectful discussions.

I'd also encourage all of us to only participate in threads which were managed in a respectful way. Just be silent and let the other stuff die out of a natural death.

 

[sfs]

This is why Creationists cannot pass peer review in any paper that treats of evolutionaly "science." Since the truth of evolutionn is a basic starting point, anything that questions it does not "Meet the accepted standards of their discipline" and is considered irrelevant, unwarranted, an unacceptable interpretation, or a personal view.

The truth of evolution is not one of the standards of biology. The standards include things like sound experimental or observational technique, testable hypotheses and proper citation of previous studies. I have peer reviewed quite a few papers on evolution (I've got two in the queue right now), and I would have no problem at all considering a paper that attacked a particular aspect of evolution, whether a theoretical aspect or a piece of reconstructed evolutionary history.

What I would be unlikely to treat seriously would be a paper that proposed to overthrow all of evolution by some single knock-down argument. Evolution is supported by a vast array of evidence, and no single study or finding could outweigh all of that. (Indeed, no single individual could even know what all of the evidence is.) Were evolution ever to be overthrown as a theory, it would be by the steady accumulation of inconsistencies and anomalies, places where the theory just didn't work. Those studies could easily pass peer review, and they would collectively bring it down. And those are the studies that creationists have not produced.

 

[sfs]

The reason such comments are accepted in Physics publications and mathematical publications is that these are pure sciences, with very little opinion involved (actually, opinion is basically a no-no.)

I've been both a physicist and a geneticist, and I have detected no substantial difference in the standards in the two fields. In my experience, physics uses more sophisticated mathematical models and less statistical rigor than evolutionary genetics.

The paper I spoke of was a mathematical examination of one field critical to the advance of evolutionary development. It was a review of observed mutations in the fruit fly to find any that conferred a reproductive advantage to those individuals that had the mutation. I found one claim that such a mutation had once been observed, and I reported it, but stated that this was dismissed as hearsay because the article did not give any details about the allegedly observed mutation.

The actual data gleaned from the available published material was 5000 observed mutations, with 90% lethal, and with 90% ot the non-lethal mutations obviously crippling. But without even one that conferred an obvious advantage.

Statistically, this data yeilds the conclusion that there is no greater than a 50% probability that the ratio of beneficial mutations to detrimental mutations exceeds one in ten thousand. But the available data does not yeild any information as to how much smaller the ration might be. It only tells us that there is no more than a 50% probability that it is any greater than one in ten thousand. But since mutations normally occur only about once in ten thousand reproductions, this means that the chance that a benificial mutation will occur in a given reproduction is some unknown amount less that one in one hundred million.

You were presumably dealing solely with mutations with visible phenotypic effect, and your numbers are plausible for that set. Such large mutations are uncommon and almost always deleterious. Now that we can examine the genetic sequence directly, however, we have learned that the vast majority of mutations are undetectable by obvious changes to the phenotype and that the great majority of mutations are selectively neutral. Rather than one mutation per 10,000 reproductions, the actual number is (for humans) 100 mutations for every reproduction. Of those, a tiny fraction are visibly deleterious, while approximately 1 out of the hundred is mildly deleterious. A much smaller number is beneficial. If, say, the ratio of deleterious to beneficial mutations is 20,000 to 1, then throughout human history there has been more than one beneficial mutation occurring somewhere in the population every generation.

Data that has emerged since my university days has dmonstrated that the concept of a beneficial mutation is a statistical monstrosity, probably millions of times, and perhaps even billions of times smaller than my data indicated. When we realize the complexity of the genetic code, we realize that the chances that a random change in that code could improve it are somewhere between nil and zero.

I'm sorry, but this is simply wrong. If you put any rapidly reproducing organism (bacteria, yeast, insects) in a novel environment, beneficial mutations will be seen in the lab. They are frequently seen in the wild, where (among other things) they lead to pesticide-resistant insects and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The key mutation that confers chloroquine resistance to malaria, for example, occurred once in southeast Asia, and subsequently spread throughout Asia and Africa; an independent mutation in the same gene occurred in malaria in the New World.

Yet evolution absolutely requires that this has happened again and again, numberless times, in every species on the earth today.

Since we can easily observe it happening in the lab and in the wild, and can even readily trace the occurrence of beneficial mutations in humans, this does not constitute a valid argument against evolution.

 

[sfs]

Matthew, I find it increasingly annoying that you find it necessary to title all your threads in an insulting manner. There are enough threads around here on both sides of the issues done that way. I encourage everyone to raise the standard of our discourse into loving honest respectful discussions.

I'd also encourage all of us to only participate in threads which were managed in a respectful way. Just be silent and let the other stuff die out of a natural death.

I haven't been around much lately, so I don't know what other thread titles Matthew has perpetrated, but I don't see what's insulting about this one. (Grammatically incorrect, yes, but that's something that happens to all of us.) The failure of creationists to pass, or even in most cases to submit to, scientific peer review strikes me as a valid criticism of any claims they make to scientific validity.

 

[The Barbarian]

It should also be noted that many creationists do good and useful scientific work apart from their religious notions of creationism, and they are often published. But it is a fact that science is too weak a method to include God; that sort of thing requires a larger schema of knowledge than science can manage.

 

[Biblewriter]

Rather than one mutation per 10,000 reproductions, the actual number is (for humans) 100 mutations for every reproduction. Of those, a tiny fraction are visibly deleterious, while approximately 1 out of the hundred is mildly deleterious. A much smaller number is beneficial. If, say, the ratio of deleterious to beneficial mutations is 20,000 to 1, then throughout human history there has been more than one beneficial mutation occurring somewhere in the population every generation... The key mutation that confers chloroquine resistance to malaria, for example, occurred once in southeast Asia, and subsequently spread throughout Asia and Africa; an independent mutation in the same gene occurred in malaria in the New World.

Here is data in your own post indicating that it is unreasonable. If this mutation has occured only twice in the entire world in all the bacterial reproductions that have occurred since a cure for malaria was found, the ration is trillions of times smaller that 20,000 to 1.

 

[The Barbarian]

It would be, if that particular mutation was the only possible good one. But of course, there is an endless variety of good ones.

We see favorable mutations almost constantly.

 

[Sphinx777]

​

 

[The Barbarian]

Would you like to learn more about some of them? Forget Pokemon/Xmen. Creationist ideas of mutation are often pretty odd.

 

[Sphinx777]

In biology, mutations are changes to the nucleotide sequence of the genetic material of an organism. Mutations can be caused by copying errors in the genetic material during cell division, by exposure to ultraviolet or ionizing radiation, chemical mutagens, or viruses, or can be induced by the organism, itself, by cellular processes such as hypermutation. In multicellular organisms with dedicated reproductive cells, mutations can be subdivided into germ line mutations, which can be passed on to descendants through the reproductive cells, and somatic mutations, which involve cells outside the dedicated reproductive group and which are not usually transmitted to descendants. If the organism can reproduce asexually through mechanisms such as cuttings or budding the distinction can become blurred. For example, plants can sometimes transmit somatic mutations to their descendants asexually or sexually where flower buds develop in somatically mutated parts of plants. A new mutation that was not inherited from either parent is called a de novo mutation. The source of the mutation is unrelated to the consequence, although the consequences are related to which cells are affected.

Mutations create variation within the gene pool. Less favorable (or deleterious) mutations can be reduced in frequency in the gene pool by natural selection, while more favorable (beneficial or advantageous) mutations may accumulate and result in adaptive evolutionary changes. For example, a butterfly may produce offspring with new mutations. The majority of these mutations will have no effect; but one might change the color of one of the butterfly's offspring, making it harder (or easier) for predators to see. If this color change is advantageous, the chance of this butterfly surviving and producing its own offspring are a little better, and over time the number of butterflies with this mutation may form a larger percentage of the population.

Neutral mutations are defined as mutations whose effects do not influence the fitness of an individual. These can accumulate over time due to genetic drift. It is believed that the overwhelming majority of mutations have no significant effect on an organism's fitness. Also, DNA repair mechanisms are able to mend most changes before they become permanent mutations, and many organisms have mechanisms for eliminating otherwise permanently mutated somatic cells.

Mutation is generally accepted by the scientific community as the mechanism upon which natural selection acts, providing the advantageous new traits that survive and multiply in offspring or disadvantageous traits that die out with weaker organisms.

Source

 

[The Barbarian]

It is considered ethical to give a citation for material you haven't written yourself.

 

[Assyrian]

Last edited by Sphinx777; 5th January 2009 at 01:30 AM.

Ooh that's fast!

 

[sfs]

Here is data in your own post indicating that it is unreasonable. If this mutation has occured only twice in the entire world in all the bacterial reproductions that have occurred since a cure for malaria was found, the ration is trillions of times smaller that 20,000 to 1.

The situation is more complicated than that, I'm afraid. The key mutation I'm talking about requires at least three other mutations (and possibly as many as eight) to function. (Whether the other mutations are needed to produce the resistance, or instead to compensate for the change in protein function caused by the key mutation, is not known.) So it wasn't a single mutation that only occurred once -- it was a sequence of at least four mutations, three of which provided only very weak selective advantage by themselves.

This multi-step mutation process is much more unlikely to occur than a single mutation, and probably explains why chloroquine survived as an effective drug for 20 years, while sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (which requires a simpler set of multiple mutations for resistance to occur) lasted less than five years, and at least one other drug has been lost to drug resistance while still in clinical trials.

Incidentally, looking at the literature, I see that the same key mutation has occurred in the wild at least four times, once in southeast Asia, once in Papua-New Guinea and twice in South America. It has also been seen repeatedly in lab experiments. In reality, any population of malaria that is exposed to CQ will develop resistance to it eventually.

In any case, your original claim was that the chance of any beneficial mutation occurring was essentially zero. Now we're arguing about a just one beneficial mutation that has occurred at least a half dozen times independently. Do you recognize now that your original claim was incorrect?

(Incidentally, malaria is not caused by bacteria, but by single-celled parasites.)