Merry Kitz-mas

Posted by Siamang on: 12.20.2007 /

By Siamang

Two years ago today, December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones III issued his ruling in the Intelligent Design trial Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board. Karl Mogel reminds us that in honor of the day, Science Bloggers annually post about the effects the trial has had on the Intelligent Design movement.

I want to talk about a small thing that has not changed. More on that in a bit. First I want to remind readers of the words of Judge Jones in his ruling (pdf) which struck down the attempts to teach Intelligent Design, or ID, in the Dover schools:

“Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions,” Jones wrote. “The inescapable truth is that both [Alan] Bonsell and [William] Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions. … Bonsell repeatedly failed to testify in a truthful manner. … Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony.”

…

“The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

…

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial.”

With those words in mind, especially those speaking to the intellectual honesty of the Intelligent Design proponents… I want to talk about one particularly dramatic part of the trial.

Michael Behe is on the stand. Michael Behe is a biochemist and professor at Lehigh University, and author of the Intelligent Design book “Darwin’s Black Box, The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution”, and he’s on the stand defending a claim that his book had been through a rigourous peer-review process. Behe was asked if the peer review given for Darwin’s Black Box was as rigorous as the peer-review given to candidates for publication in scientific journals. He said it was more rigorous:

Furthermore, the book was sent out to more scientists than typically review a manuscript. In the typical case, a manuscript that’s going to — that is submitted for a publication in a scientific journal is reviewed just by two reviewers. My book was sent out to five reviewers.

Furthermore, they read it more carefully than most scientists read typical manuscripts that they get to review because they realized that this was a controversial topic. So I think, in fact, my book received much more scrutiny and much more review before publication than the great majority of scientific journal articles.

But then council for the plaintiff produced this article by one of Behe’s “rigorous” peer-reviewers that stated plainly that his “review” was nothing more than a ten-minute phone-call from his editor:

The editor [of Darwin's Black Box]was not certain that this manuscript was a good risk for publication. There were clearly theological issues at hand, and he was under the impression that these issues would be poorly received by the scientific community…

The editor shared his concerns with his wife. His wife was a student in my class. She advised her husband to give me a call. So, unaware of all this, I received a phone call from the publisher in New York. We spent approximately 10 minutes on the phone. After hearing a description of the work, I suggested that the editor should seriously consider publishing the manuscript…It sounded like this Behe fellow might have some good ideas, although I could not be certain since I had never seen the manuscript. We hung up and I never thought about it again.

“Is this your understanding of the kind of peer review that Dr. Atcheson did of your book?” “No,” Behe replied. Rothschild continued, “he didn’t review it carefully… he didn’t review it at all.” Behe: “My understanding is different.”

Okay. We’ve got that one there. But there are four other reviewers. Surely THEY reviewed it and found it sound, right?

Well, not these three:

Robert Shapiro
Shapiro has said that he reviewed the book, and while he agreed with some of its analysis of origin-of-life research, he thought its conclusions are false, though the best explanation of the argument from design that was available.

K. John Morrow
Morrow criticised the book as appalling and unsupported, which contributed to the original publisher turning down the book for publication.

Russell Doolittle
Doolittle, upon whom Behe based much of his discussion of blood clotting, described it as misrepresenting many important points and disingenuous, which also contributed to the original publisher turning down the book for publication.

Okay, so we have one tepid endorsement, two outright rejections and one ten-minute phone call with the head of a veterinary school. Behe has not mentioned the name of the fifth reviewer, and he or she has not publicly identified themself.

Here’s Dr. Morrow writing about his “peer-review” of DBB:

Hi Alan, I did review Behe’s book for a publisher who turned it down on the basis of my comments, and those of others (including Russell Doolittle who trashed it). When I reviewed Behe’s book I was much more polite than Doolittle, who didn’t mince words. Eventually Behe found another publisher, so he’s right; it was peer reviewed. What he doesn’t say is that is was rejected by the first set of reviewers. I also debated Behe in Dallas in 1992. Once, again, I attempted to be civil, professional and dignified. Behe’s response was aggressive, condescending and simply rude. I will say, unequivocally, I am (as practically every professional working biologist I have every met) convinced by the overwhelming body of evidence that Darwin’s concept of evolution, and its subsequent modifications by the last 150 years of investigation, is the correct, and the best explanation for the great cornucopia of living creatures with which we share this planet. I’m absolutely appalled by Behe’s arguments, which are simply a rehash of ideas that Darwin considered and rejected. There is not a shred of evidence to support intelligent design, and a vast body of evidence that argues against it. It is not a scientific hypothesis, it simply the philosophical wanderings of an uniformed (or disingenuous) mind.

This is peer-review? This is a peer review that Behe says is more rigorous than what the average scientific paper has to endure to be published?

Okay, but let’s say this was all a surprise to Behe. Let’s say he was caught off-guard and didn’t know during the trial that the peer-review of his book was a fiasco.

Let’s give Behe all the benefit of the doubt we can muster.

But now we get to the part where something hasn’t changed in the two years since Judge Jones talked about the lies and the duplicity of the ID advocates. Two years after one of Behe’s peer-reviewers revealed that the review was a phone call, and another reviewer called it “the philosophical wanderings of an uniformed (or disingenuous) mind.”

What hasn’t changed?

The Discovery Institute’s website, two years later, still lists Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box” as a peer-reviewed book.

I guess some things never change.

-Siamang

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