Mike Dunford was a graduate student in the Department of Zoology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where he studied evolution. Life as an army spouse has since moved him on to Pensacola, where he's currently trying to figure out what to do next. While he's doing that, he writes stuff here, although not usually in the third person. He's also a contributer to Bill Dembski seems to have decided that the sour grapes strategy is a winner - or at least less of a loser than anything else he's come up with lately. He's following up Denyse O'Leary's spectacularly bad series of peer review posts with a link to an article by Ross McKitrick on the evils of position statements by scientific societies.
McKitrick is a noted global warming "skeptic," and he's bitching about the quality of the grapes because the American Meteorological Society has released a draft position statement on climate change. Dembski is concerned about position statements because just about every scientific society in the known universe has released a statement pointing out the sad fact that Intelligent Design quite simply isn't science. I suspect that both Dembski and McKitrick would view position statements differently if their own positions received much in the way of support.
Comments
Mike, you are just using this "sour grapes" thing to dodge the real issues. As for peer review, Darwinists thought that peer review was fine until a pro-ID paper by Stephen Meyer passed peer review and was published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Then all hell broke loose.
Posted by: Larry Fafarman | November 27, 2006 3:14 PM
Fraud has a way of stirring things up when it is discovered. Nobody thinks peer review is fine. It has many flaws, but is analogous to democracy in that there is nothing better to take its place.
Fortunately, if you have the evidence you can get past myopic reviewers, eventually. We await the evidence on ID. Don't hold your breath.
Anyway, peer review is not the real test of a hypothesis. Replication and successful prediction along with confirmation from other fields are some of the marks of a successful theory.
Posted by: JohnnieCanuck | November 28, 2006 3:22 PM
To be more precise, the Meyer paper by-passed peer review.
Posted by: W. Kevin Vicklund | November 30, 2006 4:57 PM
Farfetchman is lying, as usual/always.
Posted by: truth machine | December 6, 2006 7:38 AM
Lacking something constructive to add, I'll nitpick about something irrelevant instead. Technically, the "sour grapes" metaphor relates to the expression of disdain about something desired, but not attained. In Aesop's fable, the fox rationalizes his inability to reach the grape cluster by saying that they probably were sour anyway. McKitrick might say that it's okay that he failed to become a real scientist because, uhh, they don't make as much as Warren Buffett.
Posted by: Malthudamus | December 16, 2006 10:06 AM