Comments on Genomics, Evolution, and Pseudoscience: A stealth attempt to sneak creationism into a peer...

The Creationists, or I.D.er's, speak of "irreducib...

2009-10-13T18:24:27.049-07:00

The Creationists, or I.D.er's, speak of "irreducible complexity" or (in this 'stealth attempt') "so complex" as to demand a "mighty creator", aka "God".

My question is:"When does 'complexity' become 'irreducible'?" Does a "reducible simplicity" exist?
Is a quark irreducible? a boson? electron? atom? molecule? compound? germ? etc. At what level does complexity demand a creator? Is there any object that does not demand a creator?

Remember Jonathon Swift's
"So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas that bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum."

It should be okay if ID articles sometimes pass th...

2009-10-08T07:28:27.173-07:00

It should be okay if ID articles sometimes pass through editorial censor - in principle anyway. Otherwise, it would look like the said journal in is dogmatically 'biased'. But, and such a big but, ID so far has been so substandard and so sub-everything that almost none of these papers have made it through the editorial process.

D Andrew White MSc arborist

Curtis, I think you're being a bit harsh on Korea....

2008-02-17T10:33:02.155-08:00

Curtis, I think you're being a bit harsh on Korea. They (the government, scientists, and others) were certainly embarrassed at the recent scandal involving Hwang Woo-suk, who falsified his findings about embryonic stem cells. His reputation is in tatters, deservedly so. Han deserves a similar fate.

Proteomics site on Wiley Interscience has contact ...

2008-02-15T08:29:27.377-08:00

Proteomics site on Wiley Interscience has contact information for the authors.

Dr. Mohammad Warda can be contacted at maawarda@mailer.eun.eg , and Dr. Jin Han at phyhanj@inje.ac.kr

Maybe international condemnation would take them down a notch.

The paper was apparently retracted based upon plag...

2008-02-15T08:25:55.939-08:00

The paper was apparently retracted based upon plagiarism ... "he retraction has been agreed due a substantial overlap of the content of this article with previously published articles in other journals."
Openly lampooning these idiots for bringing sectarian reasoning into a secular debate would have been more fitting.
As for “Warda and Han’s home institutions (Inje University in Korea and Cairo University in Egypt) and departments should be very concerned about how this paper makes them look;” Come on, one of these guys is from Egypt, which is a constitutional theocracy. I'm sure that his nut-job colleagues are impressed. The other author is Korean, and although Korea is not a theocracy, anyone that has been to grad school with Koreans knows that they are almost homogeneously overtly zealous evangelical christians. This is not likely to adversely affect the academic standing of either of these wackos in their own countries.

Why "well done"?The guy pulled it from behind the ...

2008-02-12T12:26:14.253-08:00

Why "well done"?
The guy pulled it from behind the scenes, there is no indication that an apology will be forthcoming, and now the authors are free to do it again somewhere else. Just because you correct a problem, doesn't make it OK. Full repair of the damage done (to the journal and the field of proteomics as a whole) will only occur with Dunn's stepping down.

Well done, Michael Dunn! Mike Dunn, the Editor-in...

2008-02-12T10:56:23.133-08:00

Well done, Michael Dunn! Mike Dunn, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Proteomics, has apparently been successful at working behind the scenes - I'm just guessing this is what happened - and the paper by Warda and Han has been retracted. Even the abstract was removed - the journal site lists it only 'retracted' in their 'Early View' section.

Hi Steven Well done, this article seems to have be...

2008-02-12T09:05:10.698-08:00

Hi Steven
Well done, this article seems to have been retracted already and it is no longer on the web site even. It has been removed from history. I assume that the Blogosphere has had an impact on the journal.

If you have a PDF could you send it. I would still like to read the paper having read all the comments.

Steven-I'll bet this ends up worse than that. I'll...

2008-02-10T08:27:57.824-08:00

Steven-

I'll bet this ends up worse than that. I'll bet Michael Dunn, the EIC, was shown at least the title of the paper and the abstract. The title alone merited scrutiny, and the abstract compelled it. This isn't (just) about a reviewer, I believe, but about a journal as well.

Kyuuketsuki,No, I'm afraid that doesn't explain it...

2008-02-10T05:48:58.241-08:00

Kyuuketsuki,
No, I'm afraid that doesn't explain it. Peer review includes everything in an article - especially the conclusions! I've reviewed 100's of articles, so believe me, we don't let this kind of statement go unchallenged.

One guess is that the reviewers were careless. But that is not an excuse. I'm hoping the editor-in-chief can fix it before the hardcopy version appears.

Hi Steven,I just posted this at our (very) pro-sci...

2008-02-09T15:29:02.980-08:00

Hi Steven,

I just posted this at our (very) pro-science campaign site (someone notified us of your article) in the UK ... my apologies in advance if I have misunderstood some part of your article or got it wrong about peer-review ... I blame the alcohol :)

"Excuse as I am typing this after several glasses of wine ... as I understand it (and I freely admit I'm no expert) peer-review does not include the conclusion, peer-review only reviews the method and data so it IS possible to slip a weird conclusion past the reviewers.

Maybe that explains it?"

Kyu

"but don’t usually disprove hypothese or present n...

2008-02-07T19:54:37.420-08:00

"but don’t usually disprove hypothese or present new work...."
left an "s" off "hypothese"????