:Reasonable Force

Whenever a discussion arises between evolution adherents and opponents, inevitably someone on the side of the prevailing scientific paradigm will attempt to defend science against charges of presuppositional bias by asserting its purported self-correcting nature.

If, they contend, evolutionary science was not a solid foundation, then at some point over the last hundred years competing theories would have supplanted it as king. While there may have been dissenters, none have survived the highly touted process of “peer review.”

In fact, the most common critique leveled against scientists critical of the theory, aside from the hand-waving claim that they practice “bad science,” is that their work doesn’t stand this rigorous peer-review process and, thus, isn’t published in any respectable scientific journals.

This U.K. Telegraph article by Robert Matthews is illustrative of why that process may not always lead to the sort of correction science may need.

At issue is the thesis that the earth’s temperature is gradually increasing primarily due to man’s influence on the planet. One scientist published a paper concluding that this “fact” was nearly universally acknowledged by scientists based on her review of 1000 papers from other scientists.

This result was greeted with skepticism by some:

They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents – and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

Some might argue at this point that this is the self-correcting nature of science at work. I would agree, but for the fact that merely doing research and drawing conclusions is not sufficient. In order for your work to be granted legitimacy by the scientific community at large, your results must be published. This is where Peiser claims he ran into trouble.

The article goes on to document claims by Peiser and others that the editorial boards of the journals Science and Nature, along with their panels of reviewers, routinely filter out submissions based on their ideological commitment to anthropogenic climate change.

Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: “It’s pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It’s the news value that is most important.”

He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review – despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.

As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail. “Other scientists have had the same experience”, he said. “The journals have a small set of reviewers who are pro-global warming.”

Representatives of both magazines deny these claims and cite other reasons for rejections which are, in some cases, no doubt legitimate. The journal Science, however, unwittingly gives itself away with its attempt to illustrate its tolerance of dissenting views:

A spokesman for Science denied any bias against sceptics of man-made global warming. “You will find in our letters that there is a wide range of opinion,” she said. “We certainly seek to cover dissenting views.”

I don’t know whether any papers have been published in Science challenging man’s culpability for climate change, but this spokesman certainly doesn’t expect to see any outside of the letters page.

If the claims of these scientists are accurate, and this is the sort of ideological barrier that meets scientists offering dissenting views on an issue as relatively unsettled as the causes of climate change, how difficult might it be for a paper to be taken seriously in such journals if it ran contra to the orthodoxy that is Darwinian evolution?

Thus the circular argument is formed by those who oppose alternatives to an evolutionary model. Intelligent Design, for example, is not to be taken seriously because its proponents haven’t submitted any research that passes the muster of peer review. It doesn’t pass peer review because all of the reviewers view legitimate science as that which falls within the evolutionary model.

In this way, the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge are able to continue to dodge the inherent fallacies of Darwinian dogma.

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