Yes, of course they could. Frightened babblers of academic orthodoxy could decide to just stop considering new ideas. Jonathan Bartlett explains:
Academics has long had a problem of being insular. Many papers are published on the basis of your status in academics, not the quality of the paper itself. This is not to say that the papers didn’t legitimately pass peer review (though that is questionable in some cases), but rather that the editor decides which papers are “worthy” of peer review based on the editor’s knowledge of that person’s prior work.
Here’s the deal: Journals live and die by their reputation, and no editor wants their journal to be Sokal’d. What does this mean? It likely means that journals will simply increase their desk-rejection (prior to peer review) of papers by newer researchers, especially of solo authorship. The effect of this will be to restrict ideas to only those which are currently fashionable and held by existing, well-known academics. If your paper has to be co-authored by someone already well-known for an editor to take you seriously, then that means that your ideas are probably really well-aligned with the mainstream.
There’s nothing wrong per se with mainstream thinking — it probably became mainstream for good reasons. However, when only mainstream thinking is allowed, this leads to insularity and an echo chamber mentality.
Jonathan Bartlett, “Will the Sokal hoaxes worsen the academic echo chamber?” at Mind Matters News (December 13, 2021)
Echo chambers are not a recipe for progress.
Takehome: When only mainstream thinking is allowed, insularity and echo chambers are the result. In order to protect against Sokal hoaxes, journal editors may choose to pass on newer researchers, narrowing the diversity of opinions in their journals
In case you missed it:
Are Sokal Hoaxes Really Helping Reform Science? The evidence is mixed. The current prank on Higher Education Quarterly prompts some questions. Serious problems exist in today’s journals but the hoaxers seem so certain of their view that they don’t approach demonstrating it in a scientific way. (Jonathan Bartlett)
Be On the Lookout for More Sokal Hoaxes. If you spot a Sokal hoax, let us know by tagging @cnaintelligence on Twitter. One of the anonymous hoaxers said, “We plan to reveal the full extent of this hoax later. For now we recommend readers look for other fake papers.” (Jonathan Bartlett)
Nah. No new ideas have ever come from academia. New ideas start in business and military organizations. True for 5000 years.
The current violent orthodoxy might be a good thing in the long term if it drives even more sane humans OUT of academia.
As a journal editor, I can quite happily say that this is rubbish. Yes, we don’t want to be Sokal’d, but we want to publish the best papers, so we’re not going to reject ones just because we don’t know the names of the authors. I’m certain this will be true of almost all journals: the exceptions will be ones that cover a specialist area where there are only a few groups working in it (and even then, they might look favourably on new blood).
At 2 Bob O’H states, “As a journal editor, I can quite happily say that this is rubbish.”
HUH?
But Bob O’H, you yourself falsely believe that some form of unguided Darwinian evolution is true for how all life on earth diversified.
Yet, as Robert Marks and company have now demonstrated, unguided Darwinian evolution does not even qualify as a hard and testable science in the first place,
Moreover, the Sokal Hoax was originally devised to test a journal’s ‘intellectual rigor’,,,
Thus Bob O’H, since unguided evolution does not even qualify as a hard and testable science in the first place, then that pretty much means, by definition, that every paper you publish for unguided Darwinian evolution in your journal is, in one form or the other, a ‘Sokal Hoax’ in that the paper is misleading and it demonstrates a lack of ‘intellectual rigor’ on your part and on the part of the other editor’s at your journal.
As Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini observed “Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical. The possibility that anything is seriously amiss with Darwin’s account of evolution is hardly considered. … The methodological skepticism that characterizes most areas of scientific discourse seems strikingly absent when Darwinism is the topic.”
Shoot Bob, you yourself have, (supposedly humorously, but none-the-less inadvertently honestly), admitted in the past that you “torture data until it confesses.”
Of course the problem with Bob O’Hara, (inadvertently honestly), admitting that he statistically ‘tortures data until it confesses’ is that data, like people, will confess to anything you want if you torture it/them long enough.
Perhaps Bob O’Hara, and evolutionists like him, should have the ‘intellectual rigor’ to let the data speak for itself and not ‘torture it’ until it says what they want it to say beforehand?
But then again, when you let the data speak for itself, then it tells a very different story than the one that Darwinian Atheists want to be told beforehand.
To clearly demonstrate that the peer-reviewed papers purporting to support unguided Darwinian evolution are, (in one form or the other), all perpetuating ‘Sokal Hoaxes’, it turns out that it is the ‘language of evolution’ itself that is a ‘narrative gloss’ that is superfluously added on top of the actual experimental data.
As the late Philip Skell pointed out, “In the peer-reviewed literature, the word “evolution” often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for “evolution” some other word – “Buddhism,” “Aztec cosmology,” or even “creationism.” I found that the substitution never touched the paper’s core.”
And as Evolutionary biologist Robert Reid stated, “Indeed the language of neo-Darwinism is so careless that the words ‘divine plan’ can be substituted for ‘selection pressure’ in any popular work in the biological literature without the slightest disruption in the logical flow of argument.”
And as Ann Gauger noted, “the icing (evolutionary language) sits atop and separate from the cake (the actual experimental data)”
To more clearly demonstrate that the peer-reviewed papers purporting to support unguided Darwinian evolution are, (in one form or the other), all perpetuating ‘Sokal Hoaxes’, it turns out that it is the ‘language of evolution’ itself that can be somewhat easily excised from, and/or replaced in, these peer-reviewed research papers without negatively effecting the actual scientific research of the papers.
In fact, when removing ‘the language of evolution’ from peer-reviewed papers, it was found that “the science not only survived, but proved healthier and more useful.”
To repeat Philip Skell’s observation, Darwinian evolution “does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology.”
Contrary to the oft-repeated false claims of Darwinian Atheists, advances in biological science owe absolutely nothing to their presupposition of unguided Darwinian evolution
Even Jerry Coyne himself honestly admitted as much and stated, as far as biological science is concerned, “Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits.”
Moreover, (although the ‘narrative gloss’ of unguided Darwinian evolution’ can be, somewhat easily, removed from the peer-reviewed literature without negatively effecting the actual scientific research of the papers), it is interesting to note what type of language cannot be removed from these peer-reviewed papers without negatively effecting the actual scientific research of the papers.
Specifically, teleological language cannot be sacrificed from these peer-reviewed research papers, (that purport to support unguided Darwinian evolution), without negatively effecting the actual scientific research of the papers.
The renowned J.B.S. Haldane himself admitted as much, “Teleology is like a mistress to the biologist; he dare not be seen with her in public but cannot live without her.”
As Denis Noble, Emeritus Professor of the University of Oxford, states, “it is virtually impossible to speak of living beings for any length of time without using teleological and normative language”.
In the following article, Stephen Talbott challenges Darwinists to, “pose a single topic for biological research, doing so in language that avoids all implication of agency, cognition, and purposiveness(i.e. teleology)”
This working biologist agrees with Noble and Talbott’s assessment and states, “in our work, we biologists use words that imply intentionality, functionality, strategy, and design in biology–we simply cannot avoid them.”
And as the following 2020 article pointed out, “teleological concepts cannot be abstracted away from biological explanations without loss of meaning and explanatory power, life is inherently teleological.”
Thus in conclusion, teleological, i.e. designed based, language is found to be absolutely essential for doing biological research, whereas ‘evolutionary language’ is found to be a superficial ‘narrative gloss’ that can be somewhat easily stripped away from the research papers without negatively effecting the actual science in the papers.
In summary, the very words that Biologists themselves are forced to use when they are doing, and/or describing, their actual biological research falsifies Darwinian evolution and proves that all the peer-reviewed papers that purport to support unguided Darwinian evolution are, for all intents and purposes, ‘Sokal Hoaxes’ in their own right in that they are inherently misleading.
Of supplemental note to the fact that the very words that Darwinists are forced to use when they are doing their biological research falsifies Darwinian evolution, it is also (very) interesting to note that, according to atheist professor of philosophy Alex Rosenberg (Duke University), if atheistic naturalism were actually true, then “no sentence has any meaning.”
And right on time, we have this,
Circling the wagons, under siege . . .