Help Me Understand

[TheRocketSurgeon]

In your third point, I agree that I need to read more of the scholarly articles.  And I agree that scientist are "pretty careful" in mark conjecture  in these articles, although I have read some which aren't so, and pass peer review with big assumptions especially in regards to evolution.  Some skepticism on peer review is generating into more of a debate lately though I notice.  I also find that many of the popular articles presented to the public far exceed the statements of the scholarly ones.  Would you agree, that in peer review accepted ideas are going to be much easier to pass, than controversial ones?  I did hear an interview of someone who had passed the peer review board, and received notice at the last minute that his article would not be published, because of complaints about it's contents and the implications that could be made.  This was unprecedented for this publisher after passing peer review, and the article was rejected because it was I.D. friendly.  (Not promoting I.D. but could be used by them). 

Do you think that evidence which may be harmful to the theory of evolution should be taught?  I do agree, that the difficulty from both sides is to do so without bias.

I have heard several of the ID people complaining that they were passed up for peer review because  they were ID proponents, but in ever case I have read directly, the journal publishers were quite clear (and indeed, follow-up articles were written on the cases I have seen) that they were making assumptions not proper for a scientific paper. It was not that they had an unpopular opinion that sunk them, but the fact that they were not following well-established scientific protocols required for any  paper to be published. There are many people in the ID community who go out of their way to play the victim card, and claim it is the nature of their work, rather than the methodology of their work, that is causing them to be excluded. If you really want to see why this is the case, read the transcript of the Kitzmiller  case, found here, or any of a number of excellent summaries of that case, at the same site.

Peer review does not quite mean what it seems from this that you think (and the author of that article thinks) it means. Peer review is the process by which scientists confirm your work through their own experiments, and publish any errors in methodology or outcome that they uncover, criticize assumptions, etc. Before being published, journals do submit their papers to a board to determine if they're even worth publishing, the first step in peer review, but the members of the board are often not fully qualified for the detailed specifics of every paper that comes in front of them, and often will just scan for grievous and/or obvious errors that would sink the thing before it got off the ground (bad data, obviously unjustified conclusions, etc). Being published is not enough, in science, though it is of course a good thing. It is merely the first major step in the peer review process... once a paper has been cited to by follow-up articles that either have tested the work or used the work in their own work, it may be considered "peer-reviewed" on a full level. Technically, no paper ever "finishes" being peer-reviewed.

And, as I think you implied, many articles aren't even being thoroughly reviewed before being published, resulting in some seriously bad science getting out there into the body of literature, which began to draw enough notice from the scientists who had to test the junk publications that some of them got together and deliberately slipped junk through to see at what rate it would pass board review. It was not a good discovery, but it is in the nature of science to spot such problems and work to correct them. Still, this is why simply relying on a published article alone is not enough to constitute "the body of scientific knowledge", despite their availability online for citation, unless the person doing the citing is also willing to look at what else was published after that article, and what other scientists said about it. In many of my online debates with Creationists or ID people, on here, I have had some articles quoted at me (or worse, quote-mined at me, a serious pet peeve of mine) that I was forced to chase down and show that the article had been roundly criticized by follow-up experiments/reviews.

When you ask me, "Do you think that evidence which may be harmful to the theory of evolution should be taught?", it tells me that you still don't trust the basic integrity of scientists. And that's okay; the best thing about science is that it doesn't ask you to trust anyone! 

Yes. I absolutely think that evidence which is harmful to any theory should be taught, if it is taught honestly, and not in a skewed way to promote an agenda. I wish I had such evidence! If I could disprove everything we think we know about evolution tomorrow, I'd have a Nobel with my name on it, in next years prize awards.