Peer review

H’mm, pretty devastating — if true. But, is it true? I doubt it. Let us start with this response to a certain objector who keeps providing lists of typical objector talking points (and who evidently wishes to be able to do so on UD’s nickel, without effective response). Not on our watch, gentilhombre: >>13 kairosfocus May 30, 2017 at 1:17 am F/N: DI’s opening remarks on the annotated list of ID professional literature updated to March 2017: BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND ANNOTATED LIST OF PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS SUPPORTING INTELLIGENT DESIGN UPDATED MARCH, 2017 PART I: INTRODUCTION While intelligent design (ID) research is a new scientific field, recent years have been a period of encouraging growth, producing a strong record of peer-reviewed scientific publications. In 2011, Read More ›

Our physics colour commentator wrote recently to advise us of the deprofessionalization of academy From Rob Sheldon, noting an article at Quillette: Over twelve years, I have watched with increasing dismay and incredulity as academic integrity, fairness, and intellectual rigor have been eroded, with the implicit endorsement of administration and faculty alike. I have witnessed the de-professionalization of the professoriate—hiring policies based on tokenized identity politics and cronyism, the increasing intellectual and ideological conformity expected from faculty and students, and the subsequent curtailment of academic freedom. Just to be clear, most of my faculty colleagues are well-educated, bright, and dedicated teachers. Some are also worthy scholars or creative authors. Yet, in addition to cronyism, the program’s hiring practices have been Read More ›

Yes, if you want credibility. From William G. Kaelin Jr at Nature: worry about sloppiness in biomedical research: too many published results are true only under narrow conditions, or cannot be reproduced at all. The causes are diverse, but what I see as the biggest culprit is hardly discussed. Like the proverbial boiled frog that failed to leap from a slowly warming pot of water, biomedical researchers are stuck in a system in which the amount of data and number of claims in individual papers has gradually risen over decades. Moreover, the goal of a paper seems to have shifted from validating specific conclusions to making the broadest possible assertions. The danger is that papers are increasingly like grand mansions Read More ›

From Daniel Engber, reviewing Richard Harris’s Rigor Mortis at Slate: Rigor may not always serve the public good. In biomedicine, everyone is looking for positive results—meaningful, affirmative experiments that could one day help support a novel treatment for disease. (That’s true both for scientists who study biomedicine at universities and those employed by giant pharmaceutical companies.) In that context, rigor serves to check scientists’ ambition and enthusiasm: It reins in their wild oversteps and helps to keep experiments on track. But not every field of research enjoys the same harmony of goals. In the sciences most relevant to policy and regulation—such as climatology, toxicology, and nutrition—academics’ focus on making new discoveries is counterbalanced by another group of researchers, funded by Read More ›

From Religious Beliefs, Evolutionary Psychiatry, and Mental Health in America, Volume 1 of the series Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach pp 49-54 at Springer: Reactions to Darwin’s Origin of Species by Kevin J. Flannelly, Abstract: The chapter describes the initial reaction of the British general public to the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the immediate and later reactions of the scientific community, and the 20th Century response of Conservative Christians in the U.S. The British public had a generally favorable reaction to Origin of Species when it was first published, and it has been said that the British public widely accepted that the theory of evolution was true within a decade of the book’s publication. Read More ›

From Jesse Singal at New York Mag: Perhaps no new concept from the world of academic psychology has taken hold of the public imagination more quickly and profoundly in the 21st century than implicit bias — that is, forms of bias which operate beyond the conscious awareness of individuals. That’s in large part due to the blockbuster success of the so-called implicit association test, which purports to offer a quick, easy way to measure how implicitly biased individual people are. When Hillary Clinton famously mentioned implicit bias during her first debate with Donald Trump, many people knew what she was talking about because the IAT has spread the concept so far and wide. It’s not a stretch to say that Read More ›

From Mic, via AP: You don’t need a scientific calculator to know that the March for Science was a massive success. Stretching across the United States — as well as globally from the North Pole to New Zealand — the March for Science saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets on Earth Day in many cities, adding up to totals much higher nationwide. Here are a few photos that begin to capture just how huge crowds nationwide became throughout the Earth Day celebration.More. Actually, looking at the photos, as UD commenter Chris Haynes notes, the crowds are just not that impressive. A number of foreseeable reasons come to mind, which makes one wonder about the impulse to hold Read More ›

Money walks. At the Washington Times: Take, for example, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). The current NIH budget is $32.3 billion, all of it from taxpayers. The Trump administration proposes to reduce that amount, though the decision is up to Congress. A scientist quoted in a recent article in The Atlantic says the proposed reduction would “bring American biomedical science to a halt.” But the NIH budget has been reduced several times in the past eight years without that happening. The 2017 March for Science is not about protecting experimental science, which is in no danger — at least, no danger from the U.S. government. It’s about pressuring lawmakers to vote for more money. But throwing more money Read More ›

From William Thomas at Physics Today: A major study on scientific integrity in the US advocates stricter policies for scientific authorship attribution, increased openness in scientific work, the reporting of negative findings, and establishment of an independent, nonprofit Research Integrity Advisory Board. “Fostering Integrity in Research,” released 11 April by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, is an update to their landmark 1992 study, “Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process.” In the intervening 25 years, the scientific research enterprise has become larger, more globalized, and increasingly driven by information technology, which has led to major changes in how the integrity of research can be eroded or protected. More. Unfortunately, I (O’Leary for News) have been Read More ›

A review of Richard F. Harris Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Marcus Munafò at Nature: Harris introduces us to the growing field of metascience — the scientific study of science itself — and some of those working in it. These reproducibility firefighters are providing answers to such empirical questions, and identifying interventions. Robert Kaplan and Veronica Irvin at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) showed that when the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute required preregistration of primary outcomes (the main outcome against which success should be judged) in clinical trials, the proportion of studies reporting a benefit fell from 57% to 8%. That’s the good news. The bad news Read More ›

Here’s Richard Webb interviewing Peter (“Higgs boson”) Higgs on the occasion of his receiving the “1851 Royal Commission medal for outstanding influence on science” at New Scientist: What would your advice be to someone who has your sort of esoteric interests? Go undercover. I wasn’t productive in an obvious way; I didn’t churn out papers. I think these days the University of Edinburgh would have sacked me long ago, there’s just too much competition. So now I would say, do it in your spare time, and get yourself a solid publication record in the sort of thing that gets you recognition more readily. More. Higgs has noted this before: Higgs boson discoverer wouldn’t get a job today? “He doubts a similar breakthrough Read More ›

Is the field full of “undead” theories? From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Science is embattled in a raging replication crisis, in which researchers are unable to reproduce a number of key findings. On the front lines of this conflict is psychology. In a 2015 review of 98 original psychology papers, just 36 percent of attempted replications returned significant results, whereas 97 percent of the original studies did. “Don’t trust everything you read in the psychology literature,” reporter Monya Baker warned. “In fact, two thirds of it should probably be distrusted.” How did psychology reach such a sorry state of affairs? Back in 2012, when the replication crisis was just beginning to gain prominence in the popular media, psychology professors Moritz Read More ›

In place of “research misconduct.” From Helen Briggs at BBC News: The scale of “fake research” in the UK appears to have been underestimated, a BBC investigation suggests. Official data points to about 30 allegations of research misconduct between 2012 and 2015. However, figures obtained by the BBC under Freedom of Information rules identified hundreds of allegations over a similar time period at 23 universities alone. … Co-founder of Retraction Watch, Dr Ivan Oransky, told BBC News: “We do not have a good handle on how much research misconduct takes place, but it’s become quite clear that universities and funding agencies and oversight bodies are not reporting even a reasonable fraction of the number of cases that they see.” More. Read More ›

At Marchin’, marchin’: The experts are right, it’s the facts that are wrong, I responded to some comments and offer a linked version here: — johnnyb, Upright Biped, and rvb8, my principal concern is that people, including people in science, can’t better their game if they won’t address their weaknesses. The Marchin’, Marchin’ for Science movement is dangerously deluded if it thinks that the public is against science, “hates science,” etc. I’ve followed science stories for over two decades now. As so often, the answer is simpler, clearer, and less comfortable*: Most people who do not work in science or follow science news interact with it in areas like medicine. Medicine matters. Even if the Higgs boson were shown to Read More ›

Part two of my series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Good Ones’ is now up on my blog. This one is quite in depth, but a couple of interesting issues come up along the way. I examine the concept of soft and hard anomalies in scientific theories and how they might affect theory change. I then look at the claim that ID’s scientific core is too meagre to be considered serious science. The final objection I analyse is the claim that ID violates a metatheoretic shaping principle known as scientific conservatism. In part one of this series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Read More ›