Archive for the ‘intelligent design’ Category
The journal Peptides has very lax standards…
February 18th, 2010 | Author: Tom
Peer review. It’s at the very core of science, and it is designed to filter out the scientific wheat from the nonsense chaff.
However, sometimes it goes wrong. The journal Peptides has published a very strange article, entitled ‘Protein information content resides in rare peptide segments’. On the face of it, the article is about pentapeptide motifs found in proteins, a fairly reasonable scientific topic. However, the abstract manages to slip in this phrase:
an ‘intelligent design’ is now a popular way to explain the information produced in biological systems.
How in the name of arse did this get published? Intelligent Design (Creationism light) has been shown to be complete nonsense by everyone, even the courts. The paper goes on to mention further Discovery Institute stock phrases, such as ‘specified complexity’ and ‘information content’.
So, if you want to easily publish, go to Peptides! They don’t care what you put in your abstract, and they don’t mind ID language! Who knows, maybe this paper will be retracted at a later date…
By the way, I first read about this on the blog of PZ Myers. He has done a much more throughout deconstruction of the paper over at his blog Pharyngula.
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