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Peer review

National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins faces a problem more challenging than the human genome: Race bias

Social signals are potent, and among the most potent are “Who You Know” and “Who You Owe.” Trouble is, these signals tend to travel exclusive channels. Subtle checklists lurk at every turn. And quantitative research methods often do not identify key signals like “Do WE need him to succeed?” Insightful qualitative analysis is the next step. Read More ›

“Cutting journals out of scientific publishing to a large extent would be unconditionally a good thing”

At Genomes Unzipped: Personal Public Genomics, Joe Pickrell starts another round of “What’s wrong with peer review,” raising the stakes: He asks, “Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals?” (13/07/2011), arguing

In this post, I will argue that cutting journals out of scientific publishing to a large extent would be unconditionally a good thing, and that the only thing keeping this from happening is the absence of a “killer app”.

For one thing, Read More ›

Worried about getting a good affordable education in Darwinworld?

Naomi Schaefer Riley discusses “The Economic Upside to Ending Tenure” ( Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2011): In her new book, The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For (Ivan R. Dee), Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that faculty tenure is among the factors contributing to the decline of higher education in the United States. Here is an excerpt from the book. If colleges were to eliminate tenure tomorrow, they’d have to pay faculty higher salaries. That’s what most economists—and common sense—will tell you. Lifetime job security is a perk, like health insurance or a company car. If you take it away, you’ll have to compensate in another way to get the Read More ›

If peer review were a drug, would it get on the market?

Here, we’ve written a fair bit about peer review, but so have lots of sources. Here’s E. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance (climate Armageddon skeptics),

It now arises that the failures occur not just in climate science but across the board, as the article “Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun” (published in a peer-reviewed journal!), summarized and commented on here, reveals. Writes Richard Smith in his study of peer review published in Breast Cancer Review:… almost no scientists know anything about the evidence on peer review. It is a process that is central to science – deciding which grant proposals will be funded, which papers will be published, who will be promoted, and who will receive a Nobel prize. We might thus expect that scientists, people who are trained to believe nothing until presented with evidence, would want to know all the evidence available on this important process. Yet not only do scientists know little about the evidence on peer review but most continue to believe in peer review, thinking it essential for the progress of science. Ironically, a faith based rather than an evidence based process lies at the heart of science.

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Evilicious?: Monkeys r’ us prof Marc Hauser barred from Harvard lecture room

From New Scientist we learn, “Shamed Harvard scientist is barred from the classroom” (Peter Aldhous, 21 April 2011):

Marc Hauser, the prominent animal cognition researcher found guilty of scientific misconduct by Harvard University last year, is to receive no rapid rehabilitation by his closest colleagues.

He’s the one who made Discover’s Top Ten Retractions list (# 3) fr unsubstantiable claims about monkey minds.

According to The Boston Globe, members of the university’s psychology faculty voted in February not to allow Hauser to teach in the department in the 2011-2012 academic year. Following the vote, Michael Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, decided that he shouldn’t be allowed to teach in other departments, either. Could his upcoming book Evilicious have helped tip the applecart?  Read More ›

Peer review ineffectiveness findings make waves

At AITSE (Caroline Crocker’s outfit), we are reminded of an Atlantic article (November 2010) on how little peer review actually contributes to the growth of a stable knowledge base:

Dr. John Ioannidis, formerly of Harvard University, Johns Hopkins and National Institutes of Health, is currently leading a team investigating whether medical research studies can be trusted and is making waves. He says that 90% of published results cannot. Moreover, he claims that peer-review by the scientific community is ineffective in addressing the problem. His research shows that, of the top 49 articles published in the last 13 years, only 25% of the claims to have found an effective intervention (e.g. daily aspirin or Vitamin E to reduce risk of heart attacks) were retested. This is understandable because 1) there is little funding for repeating someone else’s work, and 2) for an article to be accepted for publication it needs to contribute new understanding; repeated experiments do not. Of those claims that were re-tested, 41% were found to have been significantly exaggerated or simply wrong.

The problem isn’t that peer review does no good but that it isn’t doing the good needed now.

Suzan Mazur (non-Darwinian evolution news desk 1, new media) offers a number of articles on the defects of the current system in assessing the validity of research: Read More ›

Peer review: Supplemental materials nixed

In “Supplemental or detrimental?: Journals debate the value of supplemental materials”, Michele Solis reports at The Scientist (24th February 2011) on the problem material supplemental to journal publications, available only online, materials publication creates for peer review, and the bold step Journal of Neuroscience and several other journals have taken by just abolishing it: Editor-in-chief John Maunsell argued in an editorial that the escalating amount of supplemental materials had begun to devalue the peer review process.[ … ] “More data, in and of itself, is always a good thing — if there aren’t adverse effects,” said Maunsell, who is also a neuroscientist at Harvard University. But peer review was becoming less effective because many reviewers failed to evaluate the supplemental Read More ›

Michael Behe in Peer-Reviewed Journal!

Casey Luskin Reports: Peer-Reviewed Scientific Paper by Michael Behe Challenges “Gain of Function” Mutations in Molecular Evolution Behe argues that we do not generally observe the evolution of new adaptive FCTs (Functional Coded ElemenTs) in the laboratory. Rather, when we observe adaptive evolutionary changes in the laboratory, they typically involve loss of function or modification of FCTs. This leads to the question, How do new adaptive FCTs arise? In two subsequent posts, I will discuss Behe’s review of FCT evolution in bacteria and viruses, as well as the implications he draws from that data.

The Panda’s Thumb Goes After Casey Luskin Yet Again

Casey Luskin, Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs for the Discovery Institute, has recently published an article entitled ZEAL FOR DARWIN’S HOUSE CONSUMES THEM:HOW SUPPORTERS OF EVOLUTION ENCOURAGE VIOLATIONS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE in the Liberty University Law Review. Luskin continues to be a favorite target of the anti-ID crowd over at The Panda’s Thumb, and this article is no exception. The task of misrepresenting Luskin fell to attorney Timothy Sandefur, who frequently contributes to the Panda’s Thumb blog site.

Luskin clearly lays out the intent of the article in the very first paragraph and writes:

The common stereotype in the controversy over teaching evolution holds that it is the opponents of evolution who are constantly trying to “sneak religious dogma back into science education.”1 While perhaps in some
instances this caricature is not entirely undeserved,2 the mainstream media and legal community pay scant attention to incidents where proponents of Darwinian evolution transgress the boundary between church and state erected by the Establishment Clause. By documenting ways that evolution advocates encourage violations of the Establishment Clause—in some instances, explicitly advocating state endorsement of pro-evolution religious viewpoints in the science classroom—this Article will show the impropriety of the common “Inherit the Wind stereotype.”3

Apparently this clear of a statement isn’t good enough for Sandefur who sniffs:

It will come as no surprise to anyone that Luskin’s argument is flimsy, his evidence illusory, his readings of the case law distorted, and the overall effect essentially a fun-house mirror version of First Amendment law.

Read More ›

The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs!

A friend directed me to this fun little article from the Jewish World Review. I’m not a regular reader of JWR, so missed this wonderful little piece from Paul Greenberg, in which he recalls the Sokal Hoax of 1996. For those not familiar with it, the Sokal Hoax was an article written by Professor Alan Sokal, a professor of Physics at New York University and submitted to a not too widely followed academic journal called Social Text as part of a series on Science wars. The article was entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,( Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996), and was, according to Greenberg, Read More ›

Climategate: Plausibility and the blogosphere in the post-normal age.

Philosopher at Large, Dr. Jerome Ravetz has a fascinating exploration of moral and peer review issues on ClimateGate as “Post-Normal science” at Watts Up With That

. . .
At the end of January 2010 two distinguished scientific institutions shared headlines with Tony Blair over accusations of the dishonest and possibly illegal manipulation of information. Our ‘Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035′ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is matched by his ‘dodgy dossier’ of Saddam’s fictitious subversions. . . . The parallels are significant and troubling, for on both sides they involve a betrayal of public trust. . . .
Climategate is particularly significant because it cannot be blamed on the well-known malign influences from outside science, be they greedy corporations or an unscrupulous State. This scandal, and the resulting crisis, was created by people within science who can be presumed to have been acting with the best of intentions. Read More ›