A TSZ member recently made this claim:
Sanford’s recent paper with Cordova was rejected by multiple venues for bogus reasons. Everyone agreed the science is solid, but made up reasons why the paper should not be accepted.
And then is asked:
Name the venues and give their reasons for the rejection.
I’ve actually been asking this for literally years over at UD, although not lately. The claim that papers are rejected not because of the science but instead because of some other reason is often made. But I’ve never seen any actual evidence of this. Has anyone?
In fact, it’s also the stated reason from some at UD as to why they don’t even attempt to formally publish their work, they know it would simply be rejected for ideological reasons only.
Yet despite many years of asking I have never once seen any evidence for this claim. So in this thread I’d like to see the paper that was submitted, the journal or other it was submitted to and the rejection itself.
If nobody can supply any such evidence then this OP can be used in rebuttal in the future when such claims are again made, as we all know they will be.
As DNA_Jock points out this claim is false. Perhaps you should slow down and read for content and clarity. Here are a few snippets regarding the technical aspects of the paper, i.e., conclusions, methods, etc. that run contrary to your claim(s). All snippets are from the link you provided. It is a bit long but I included all the ones you apparently missed in your reading.
Yes I read those. They seem to be summed up in my comment: tone and not enough iterations. That is reason to improve the paper, but not reject it.
Then Matheson has his own opinion about what is publishable, but that is his own issue.
I would characterize the general attitude towards the DI here and elsewhere as ‘guilty until proven guilty.’. It’s clear you all are on a witch hunt.
I would characterize the DI stooge’s whining here as “I know ID is scientifically worthless but I’m compelled to lie about the DI’s anti-science bullshit because we have GOD on our side!”
Yet another falsehood. The thread clearly shows that Sal’s manuscript had multiple significant methodological problems; the idea that this is “summed up by your comment” is untenable. I did enjoy the idea that the shortfalls (of whatever nature) were “reason to improve the paper, but not reject it.” In the academic world, papers that require any improvements beyond the simplest of copy-editing are generally rejected until the authors make good the deficiencies.
No wonder you guys have difficulty publishing. 😮
If you are referring to the idea that articles should express something not already generally accepted, then I think you will find that this view is rather common amongst editorial staff, and not “Mathesons’s own issue” at all.
No witch hunting from me. I’m just skeptical. Nothing good has come out of the DI and I have no good reason to expect that to change.
Sanford and Sal’s paper had some laughably overstated conclusions about frameshift mutations, based apparently on the debunking of a single historical example.
The sentiment seemed to be that because Sanford and Sal had found that Ohno’s example was wrong, they wanted to stuff their paper full of generalizations their data can not support, that all frameshift mutations are either false, or based on speculation, or in some other way degenerative that they can spin to fit in with Sanford’s “Genetic Entropy” nonsense. Then if they could get that paper past peer review in some “presitigous” journal, they could then use the paper as a resource of carefully crafted sentences easy to quote and paste to impress ill-prepared laymen about how the primary literature supports their creationistic ideology.
That is of course the entire purpose of them writing and trying to get the paper published in the first place, motivated entirely by their a priori commitments to creationistic ideology about what can or can’t happen. A tool to be used for propagandizing about creationism.
Please don’t ask me to pretend not to understand that this is what is going on here. And you of course know it Eric.
Ironically, it is ID that convinced me God is a possible explanation, and I converted to Catholicism, since Aquinas’ conception of natural law is most consistent with the ID notion that teleology is empirically detectable.
Before I believed that everything had to come from chance and necessity, and there was no other coherent way to describe reality, so there was no need for God and religious concepts like the soul and free will. Everything could be completely described by a computer program. By Occam’s razor, religion was a useless addon.
Dembski’s concept of CSI showed me that there were more describable causes besides chance and necessity, and that we could empirically detect the incursion of these causes, without resorting to a “____ of the gaps” type explanation.
So, at least for me, the direction is the opposite of what you state. I believe in God in large part due to ID. Note, this is because ID opened my mind to the possibility of God as a meaningful explanation, not because ID directly necessitated the existence of God as an explanation.
I’ve spent the last decade and a half understanding and applying the mathematics that Dembski developed, and never found any problems. It also turns out Dembski’s fundamental idea was already discovered by Leonid Levin in his 1984 paper on randomness conservation. Levin is one of Kolmogorov’s students who went on to invent the concept of NP Completeness. I’ve also found some useful applications for the mathematics. It is not easy, but I also cannot say ID, at least in the mathematical realm, is scientifically fruitless.
So, it sounds to me that it is rather you who are being dogmatic because of your commitment to anti-IDism. You don’t really seem to understand much about the theory. At least not enough to dismiss the ideas like you have.
Believe it or not, my opinions expressed here are sincerely held. I’m not a shill for the DI. I say things they don’t like over at UD, and have said some not outstanding things at PS. If I ever found out intelligent design theory is fundamentally and irrecoverably flawed, I would reject it, along with God and much else.
My experience has been that deficiencies are pointed out, and if they are not fundamental, I have the opportunity to fix the problems and resubmit. My understanding is this did not happen with Sanford and Cordova.
I’m out of my depth when it comes to the paper, but no where did I see anything in the PS thread stating there was something fundamentally wrong with their paper. Same sort of reception I saw when Winston discussed his paper at PS. Just a bunch of nitpicking, a portion of which seemed outright erroneous.
As for novelty, at least in the world of evolutionary algorithm papers, where I have the most experience, I see massive amounts of variation on similar themes. Really significant novelty is few and far between.
So, I have not come away with the impression that the dismissal Sanford and Cordova received is typical.
Even in your own analysis, it seems the overriding concern is that they’ll get a paper they can quotemine and ‘fool the sheeple’ some more. Still, you are on the side of ‘guilty until proven guilty’.
EricMH,
That’s really sad & reveals a highly biased & superficial ‘theology’. It would likely be helpful for you to go speak to a priest about this, EricMH. That is absolutely not a healthy ideological position to put oneself into, such that they depend on a ‘strictly scientific’ theory, as the DI insists IDT is, as the basis for their religiosity, faith and traditions.
The only other person I’ve heard say something so shocking as this – lose IDT & they claim they would lose their religion – in over 15 years observing online conversations on this topic, is, ironically, Salvador T. Cordova, who EricMH is now defending. This is simply neither normal nor healthy a position to put oneself into & I fear for people that EricMH will proudly perpetrate & prey his ideology upon: IDism.
EricMH,
Would you be willing to discuss this comment of yours on Noyau?
In particular, if this
is addressed to me, you really ought to be willing to do so.
Wrong. Dembski’s argument in his 2002 book was CSI, not ASC, and based itself on his Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information. That argument does not work at all, and the “No Free Lunch” argument that was also featured in that book was demolished by many people who wrote rebuttals then.
If you never found any problems with the 2002 argument, you didn’t look very hard.
And it has no relationship to Algebraic Complext Specificity.
I will omit the usual forest of links I have to given when I respond to these sweeping statements about Dembski’s argument never having been refuted. You can find them in a number of previous responses like this.
ID doesn’t have a theory. ID doesn’t even have a testable hypothesis. ID is nothing more than philosophical idle speculation. The DI made it abundantly clear ID isn’t about anything scientific. It was merely a political vehicle for them to circumvent the U.S. Constitution and get their Christian religious beliefs sneaked back into public schools.
You don’t strike me as unintelligent but you’re hopelessly ignorant and naive about the political anti-science horseshit the DI has been pulling for decades. The good thing is you’re still young and have a chance to outgrow your arrogance and immaturity on scientific topics you clearly don’t understand.
Why didn’t S & C fix the problems and resubmit the paper then? I offer it’s because they knew it was scientific crap and knew they could get much more political mileage out of it by playing martyrs.
No, you don’t understand. We have seen the behavior of these people now for decades. They have proven themselves guilty over and over again. We’re not going to just suddenly forget the last two to three decades occurred. The behavior is always entirely consistent with the Wedge Strategy.
It’s all patently transparent.
If your belief in God relies on ID theory being true, then I must concur with Gregory (of all people) that you have manoeuvred yourself in a very unhealthy position. Does your faith cease to serve its purpose if you cannot have scientific evidence for God’s existence?
That seems really badly confused to me.
Aquinas’s point is that teleology is directly perceived in immediate experience, and that this shows the indispensable of teleology in our understanding of the world — granted that, he then attempts to show that we can understand what God is, using a teleological physics and metaphysics.
In making this point, Aquinas is explicitly drawing on Aristotle.
But when Dembski sets up “design” as the set-theoretic complement of “chance” and “necessity” — so if neither chance nor necessity then design — he is explicitly reaching back to Plato and to Plato’s criticism of pre-Socratic physics.
There’s a subtle but quite profound distinction between Platonic intelligent design and Aristotelian teleology here. They are not the same concept, and I think that taking ID as supporting Thomism (or conversely) is rather badly confused.
I also think it’s probably a bad idea to make your theology contingent on a pseudo-science but that’s none of my business.
In Canada, where we take curling seriously, we call that a double takeout.
Nicely played.
Yes. Without empirical support for God’s existence, no point in believing. I completely agree with atheists on this point. I just disagree whether said support exists.
As Paul says if Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, them Christians at indeed a sad bunch of fools. The actual facts and evidence matter in life as to what we ultimately believe.
Exactly my point. You seem to have never read any of Dembski’s books.
I’ll have to defer to Cordova on this, but I’m not under the impression that they were given this opportunity. Hence my central claim of bias.
My point is all the wedgie strategy should not matter in the slightest when evaluating the paper content. That is how true professionals behave.
It’s both/and. Dembski has achieved the brilliant goal of melding Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics with an empirically testable theory. Dembski’s concept of CSI captures form and function. It is brilliant.
Engineers and scientist don’t get it, but someone with a string background in the history of Western philosophy will grasp the sheer profundity of what Dembski has done.
It is true. Dembski’s argument has never been refuted. Look in all those links and you will never find a logical refutation of his argument.
FFS. How is someone going to STOP them from correcting and resubmitting the paper?
You will also never find a single case where Dembski’s hand-waving has any connection to actual evolutionary biology. Just like your ridiculous claims to have demonstrated evolution to be impossible.
Please list these testable ID hypotheses for us and tell us what would falsify them. Tell us WHY these hypotheses are predicted by ID “theory”, don’t just post the usual IDiot list of postdictions.
All you seem capable of doing is regurgitating the standard ID talking points with no understanding or ability to back them up.
You were going to show us how that was the case but ran the other way when asked to support the claim, remember?
EricMH,
Except that it fails, for reasons we’ve long since pointed out to you.
Don’t forget to mention that he’s “the Isaac Newton of information theory”.
Dembski has been refuted many times over. Twenty years after its introduction, CSI remains useless for detecting design in the biological world.
I’d love to see a counterexample.
Thanks for that frank answer.
It still seems like you are missing an important part of what faith is about, but as a non-believer I am probably not the right person to argue about this. As for myself: I think I will wait until evidence for God’s existence gets published in Nature before I convert.
Sure, but I don’t know what that means.
Name one specific instance.
My understanding from talking with Cordova is they received a flat refusal to publish.
Main one is inability of physical processes to create CSI.
Seems reasonable, but you are assuming Nature would publish such evidence.
EricMH:
Joe Felsenstein’s refutation of Dembski’s 2002 argument for the conservation of CSI.
This has been pointed out to you again and again, Eric. Don’t pretend you haven’t seen it.
FAIL. Evolutionary processes are empirically observed to create new CSI.
Evolution By Gene Duplication
Unless you’re going to try and define CSI as “that which evolution can’t produce”. 😀
You really don’t understand anything at all about actual evolutionary biology, do you?
Yes, that was the lame excuse you barfed out last time but couldn’t back up.
This is sort of a good point. What, exactly, would constitute evidence for one or more gods? Some folks point to one-time miracles, which are not reproducible and tend to be ambiguous. Others point to the world around us claiming it is ALL evidence of their particular god(s). Yet others attempt to construct post facto calculations showing how unlikely a godless world would be, or how unlikely life would be without their particular god and its motives (without ever seeming to notice that nearly every observed event is an amazing coincidence at the end of a string of amazing coincidences.)
I’ve seen plenty of challenges for believers to produce evidence of their particular god that would convince someone of some other (or no) religious faith. And the response is that “god can’t be tested”. Something in religious doctrine prohibits this, I think. But if this is true, what would Nature publish? Most of their articles are detailed descriptions of operational definitions, experimental methods, and interpretations of results. Accordingly, anything that might qualify for publication in Nature is pre-disqualified on theological grounds.
I replied in depth last time. Changing the specification is not a problem.
Are there any other refutations you know of and can concisely articulate?
That’s as far as I can go. Cordova will need to substantiate that point if he wishes.
This is an interesting point. Weren’t you previously saying ID makes no testable claims?
So you lied about there being multiple rejections and are now trying to pass your lie off on Cordova. Interesting.
If what you offered was a testable ID hypothesis then ID is already falsified. Is that your point?
EricMH:
It’s a huge problem for you.
If the specifications can be changed at will, then it’s trivial to show that CSI is not conserved.
Like it or not, Dembski was wrong.
I must have missed that reply. Can you link to it? If I’m wrong I need to know why.
To remind folks: if the specification now is “In the top
of the genotypes, ordered by fitness” then if we can prove that is conserved under natural evolutionary processes without changing the definition of the specification then that is a big problem for evolutionary biology. It means that evolution cannot get to high levels of adaptation unless it is already there. So any claim of conservation of CSI is worth careful study.
But if the definition of the specification can be changed from generation to generation, as it is in Dembski’s Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information in the sketched proof in the 2002 book No Free Lunch, then the conservation is not interesting. All it would then say is that if the population is now in a set of genotypes that initially were in top
, then in the previous generation it must have been in a set that was equally improbable. But not necessarily ones that had high fitness then.
Do point me to your reasoning as to why the second case proves conservation of something of relevance to the evolution of adaptations.
Keiths, your claim is provably false. Let C change arbitrarily and remain independent from the event x. Then it is always the case that Pr[ASC(x, P, C)>a]<2^-a. So changing C has no impact on ASC conservation, as long as C remains independent.
Felsenstein, I am referring to your scrambled image argument. My last comment in that thread was that changing the specification is not a problem
In the argument you just posted, you conclude CSI is irrelevant for your scenario. Even if I grant you this point, how does that refute Dembski's argument that natural processes cannot generate CSI? I do not see how you would reach such a conclusion.
No, I concluded that CSI is relevant, if the specification is one that is a measure of adaptation, such as being in a set of genotypes that have the highest fitnesses. I argued that there is no conservation law that prevents natural processes from getting you into that set if you start outside it. Of course, to judge that, you need to be evaluating both before and after by the same criterion.
As Dembski did not hold the criterion (the definition of specification) the same before and after in his Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information (2002), then his LCCSI does not show that natural processes cannot get you into that set from the outside.
I am actually one of CSI’s few defenders here. It is meaningful. Just not conserved.
Dembski himself said (NFL, page 148), quite reasonably, that
Then in his Conservation Law proof he did not keep the specification the same.
The same issue comes up with the closely-related concept of Functional Information, where from Szostak (2003) and Szostak, Hazen et al. (2007) on,
they keep the definition of “function” the same before and after.
Eric,
Fixed that for you.
Observe:
1. Let Z represent Joe’s zinnia image.
2. Let X be a pseudorandom XOR mask.
3. Let Y = Z ⊕ X.
4. Let Z’ = Y ⊕ X.
5. Because of the two successive XORs, Z and Z’ are equal. In other words, we get the same image we started with.
6. Evaluate the CSI of Z with respect to the specification “looks like a flower”.
7. Evaluate the CSI of Y with respect to the specification “looks like a checkerboard”. (Remember, according to you I am allowed to change the specification.)
8. Z has CSI with respect to its specification.
9. Y doesn’t have CSI with respect to its specification.
10. The transformation of Y into Z therefore increases the CSI.
11. Thus CSI is not conserved.
Your mistake was in thinking that you could fish around for a single specification that would cause the conservation inequality to be satisfied. That’s not enough — you need to show that the inequality holds under all allowable specifications. Meanwhile, I only need a single counterexample, such as the one above, to show that Dembski’s so-called “law” isn’t one.
In this case your specification is not independent from the choice of XOR filter, so it is not a valid specification.