From Breitbart News:
As we reported ten days ago under the heading Extinct Giant Snail Killed By Climate Change Crawls Back From The Dead, the sorry tale began in 2007 with the publication in one of the Royal Society’s journals Biology Letters of a “peer-reviewed” study by Justin Gerlach.
Gerlach’s study claimed that the Aldabra Banded Snail (Rhachistia aldabrae) had gone extinct in the late 1990s due to climate change.
However, this was immediately disputed by four experts in the field, led by Oxford University ecologist Clive Hambler who argued that there simply wasn’t enough evidence to justify to claim, and urged Biology Letters to print their prepared rebuttal.
It said: “The vast majority of the habitat is virtually inaccessible and has never been visited. It is unwise to declare this species extinct after a gap in known records of ten years. We predict ‘rediscovery’ when resources permit.”
Biology Letters refused to publish the rebuttal because it did not pass peer review by the same peer reviewers of the first paper.
Then the scientifically clueless snail turned up again.
James Delingpole asks,
Why, given that it has now been demonstrated beyond all doubt, that the J Gerlach paper was seriously flawed, is Biology Letters still procrastinating about printing a retraction? Hambler has suggested that it publish the original 2007 rebuttal he prepared with his three expert colleagues, one of whom unfortunately has since died. But Biology Letters is demanding Hambler submit a completely new paper which – apparently without irony – it insists must be subject to “peer review.”
Actually, that seems reasonable to some of us. Any two of the giant snails will do as peer reviewers.
Meanwhile, the supposedly extinct snail featured in handwringers about climate change extinguishing species. From Delingpole:
Snailgate is only the latest in a series of scandals to beset the Royal Society and its activist president Sir Paul Nurse. Founded in 1660 by luminaries including Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren, the Royal Society was for over three hundred years renowned as the world’s pre-eminent scientific institution. However, under its last three presidents, it has been accused of abandoning the scientific method and the pursuit of pure knowledge in favour of political advocacy and media campaigning.
Just when they had everyone but the snails convinced, too.
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