The Scientist reported yesterday that a “Paper Used in Creationist Teaching [was] Retracted After 30 Years”.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the author was a creationist, the article gives no information that it was “used in Creationist teaching.” In fact, a Google search for the article title yields no results from Creationist websites. A google search for the author’s name, Dmitrii Kuznetsov, returns a few results, mostly just including his name in a list of people who are scientists who support creationism. The paper itself is mentioned nowhere I can find. Apparently he was interviewed for a Creation magazine a few decades ago, but I couldn’t find the interview itself on the web.
Additionally, part of the group that researched and discovered Kuznetsov’s malfeasance was a member of the Intelligent Design community, Paul Nelson, who discovered three additional unverifiable/unlocatable journals that Kuznetsov cited from.
So, while the title of the article acts like this should be some blow to the Creationists, the funny thing is that this is a guy whom the Creationists themselves have long distanced themselves from. Despite the claims in the article, this paper seems to be referenced nowhere by any creationist literature. A few obscure websites list the authors name, but that’s it.
Imagine a comparable situation. Let’s say that an evolutionary biologist that few had ever heard of before and no one had ever cited wrote a paper that cited some fake journal in a paper thirty years ago, and today it gets retracted. Would it be reasonable to run a headline that states “Paper Used in Defense of Evolutionary Biology Retracted After 30 Years”?
Of course not. That would be ridiculous. But that is the level of discourse occurring at The Scientist.
NOTE – one possible problem with my search mechanism could be that the anglicization of his Russian name could have alternate spellings – if there are important places where Kuznetsov’s work has been relied upon by either Creationists or ID’ers, please post them in the comments.