Evolution, It's only a theory

Originally posted by Gawdzilla


It's odd that you can live in home with air conditioning (Thermodynamics), lighted by electricity (Electromagnetics), and use a computer to post that you don't believe in the scientific method.

(My apologies if you live in a cave and used psychic powers to post to this computer forum.)

So the scientists involved are all liars? And they don't follow scientific protocols? So the peer-review system for papers is a lie as well? Really?

What do scientific studies OF scientific studies tell us about the reliability of peer review?
This excellent scientific study is very interesting to read:

Some highlights include:

"There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false."
"Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias."

In a similar vein here is an interesting quote I extracted from a poster on statistics website focusing on global warming issues:

"People outside science have a hopelessly exaggerated idea of the quality of peer review. I am a regular reviewer for physics journals, and I probably spend about three or four hours reviewing a typical manuscript. I check that it is comprehensible, that the authors haven't made any really glaring errors, and that they give enough references to place the work in its proper context. If I have time, and the paper is very close to my own field, I check a couple of calculations. If the manuscript is for a really top journal I spend a little longer; if it's from a group I know and trust I'm not so careful. And that's it. Comparing my reviews with other reviews of the same manuscripts I get the impression that I am at the careful end of reviewing in my field.

I used to reckon as a handy rule of thumb that 10% of published papers in my field were fraudulent, 30% were erroneous, 30% were technically correct but completely irrelevant, and the remaining 30% were worth bothering with."
February 11, 2009, 2:49 pm

Why Does Peer Review Suppress New Ideas Today?

Philip Anderson, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics opines that "in the early part of
the postwar [post-WWII] period [a scientist's] career was science-driven, motivated mostly by
absorption with the great enterprise of discovery, and by genuine curiosity as to how nature
operates. By the last decade of the century far too many, especially of the young people, were
seeing science as a competitive interpersonal game, in which the winner was not the one who
was objectively right as [to] the nature of scientific reality, but the one who was successful at
getting grants, publishing in Physical Review Letters, and being noticed in the news pages of
Nature, Science, or Physics Today.... [A] general deterioration in quality, which came primarily
from excessive specialization and careerist sociology, meant quite literally that more was
worse." (20th Century Physics, pp. 2029).

But the interesting question is, what caused the "excessive specialization and careerist
sociology" that is making it very difficult for new ideas to be published in peer review journals?
There are several possibilities. One is a consequence of Anderson's observation that,
paradoxically, more scientists can mean a slower rate of scientific advance.

The number of physicists, for example, has increased by a factor of a thousand since the year 1900, when ten percent of all physicists in the world either won the Nobel Prize or were nominated for it. If you submitted a paper to a refereed journal in 1900, you would have a far greater chance of having a
referee who was a Nobel Prize winner (or at least a nominee) than now. In fact, a simple
calculation shows that one would have to submit three papers on the average to have an even
chance that at least one of your papers would be "peer" reviewed by a Nobel Prize winner.
Today, to have an even chance of having a Nobelist for a referee, you would have to submit
several hundred papers. Thus Albert Einstein had his revolutionary 1905 papers truly peer
reviewed: Max Planck and Wilhelm Wien were both later to win the Nobel Prize in physics.


Today, Einstein's papers would be sent to some total nonentity at Podunk U, who, being
completely incapable of understanding important new ideas, would reject the papers for
publication. "Peer" review is very unlikely to be peer review for the Einsteins of the world. We
have a scientific social system in which intellectual pygmies are standing in judgment of giants.
(See P. Stephan and S. Levin, Striking the Mother Lode in Science, chapter 7 for a detailed
discussion of the Pygmy Effect.)

One could argue that because the number of Nobel Prizes awarded is permanently fixed
at one per year in three scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, and medicine), the relative
decrease in Nobelists does not mean a similar decrease in the number of giants to pygmies. The
data contradict this proposal.

The most radical ideas are those that are perceived to support religion, specifically
Judaism and Christianity. When I was a student at MIT in the late 1960s, I audited a course in
cosmology from the physics Nobelist Steven Weinberg. He told his class that of the theories of
cosmology, he preferred the Steady State Theory because “it least resembled the account in
Genesis” (my emphasis). In his book The First Three Minutes (chapter 6), Weinberg explains his
earlier rejection of the Big Bang Theory: “[O]ur mistake is not that we take our theories too
seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these
numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even
worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit
subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort.” I have now known Weinberg for over thirty years, and I know that he has always taken the equations of physics very seriously indeed. He and I are both convinced that the equations of


physics are the best guide to reality, especially when the predictions of these equations are
contrary to common sense. But as he himself points out in his book, the Big Bang Theory was an
automatic consequence of standard thermodynamics, standard gravity theory, and standard
nuclear physics. All of the basic physics one needs for the Big Bang Theory was well established
in the 1930s, some two decades before the theory was worked out. Weinberg rejected this
standard physics not because he didn’t take the equations of physics seriously, but because he
did not like the religious implications of the laws of physics. A recent poll of the members of the
National Academy of Sciences, published in Scientific American, indicated that more than ninety
percent are atheists. These men and women have built their entire worldview on atheism. They
would be exceedingly reluctant to admit that any result of science could be valid if it even
suggested that God could exist.

It's odd that you can live in home with air conditioning (Thermodynamics), lighted by electricity (Electromagnetics), and use a computer to post that you don't believe in the scientific method

Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality
or Enforce Orthodoxy?
Frank J. Tipler
Professor of Mathematical Physics
Tulane University
New Orleans, LA 70118 USA
[email protected]
Introduction
I first became aware of the importance that many non-elite scientists place on "peerreviewed"
or "refereed" journals when Howard Van Till, a theistic evolutionist, said my book
The Physics of Immortality was not worth taking seriously because the ideas it presented had
never appeared in refereed journals. Actually, the ideas in that book had already appeared in
refereed journals. The papers and the refereed journals wherein they appeared were listed at the
beginning of my book. My key predictions of the top quark mass (confirmed) and the Higgs
boson mass (still unknown) even appeared in the pages of Nature, the most prestigious refereed
science journal in the world. But suppose Van Till had been correct and that my ideas had never
been published in referred journals. Would he have been correct in saying that, in this case, the
ideas need not be taken seriously?

To answer this question, we first need to understand what the "peer review" process is.
That is, we need to understand how the process operates in theory, how it operates in practice,
what it is intended to accomplish, and what it actually does accomplish in practice. Also of
importance is its history. The notion that a scientific idea cannot be considered intellectually
respectable until it has first appeared in a "peer" reviewed journal did not become widespread
until after World War II. Copernicus's heliocentric system, Galileo's mechanics, Newton's grand
synthesis-these ideas never appeared first in journal articles. They appeared first in books,
reviewed prior to publication only by the authors or by the authors' friends. Even Darwin never
submitted his idea of evolution driven by natural selection to a journal to be judged by
"impartial" referees. Darwinism indeed first appeared in a journal, but one under the control of
Darwin's friends. And Darwin's article was completely ignored. Instead, Darwin made his ideas
known to his peers and to the world at large through a popular book: On the Origin of Species.
I shall argue that prior to the Second World War the refereeing process, even where it
existed, had www.iscid.org...