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The Seattle-based creationist advocacy think-tank, The Discovery Institute tries to respond to the criticism that proponents of creationism and its cousin ‘intelligent design’, which has been called ‘creationism in a fancy suit’, do not publish in peer-reviewed scientific journal by publishing a page of short descriptions of ‘Peer-Reviewed and Peer-Edited’ publications. Things aren’t quite as they seem.

Let’s test the honesty of the Discovery Institute’s list by delving into their claim that a suitable example of a peer-reviewed paper is one entitled Genetic Analysis of Coordinate Flagellar and Type III Regulatory Circuits in which Scott Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer ‘argue explicitly that intelligent design is a better (sic) than the Neo-Darwinian mechanism for explaining the origin of the bacterial flagellum’.

Meyer is a theologian and a founder of the Discovery Institute who has a history of finding scientific support for his peculiar views where none in fact exists. He once presented an annotated bibliography of 44 peer-reviewed scientific articles to the Ohio State Board of Education that were said to significantly challenge ‘Darwinian evolution’. The authors of the papers were contacted, and twenty-six, representing thirty-four of the papers responded, all stating that they disagreed with Meyer’s representation of their work.

Scott Minnich is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Unfortunately for Scott and for the Discovery Institute’s claims for this particular paper, he provided testimony in the Dover Trial (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District), the Federal court case that ruled on teaching intelligent design in high schools.

The damaging part of the proceedings are online.

Q. And the paper that you published was only minimally peer reviewed, isn’t that true?

A (Scott Minnich). For any conference proceeding, yeah. You don’t go through the same rigor. I mentioned that yesterday. But it was reviewed by people in the Wessex Institute, and I don’t know who they were.

and then, slightly later in discussing a different paper:

Q. Unlike your paper, that is a peer reviewed scientific paper, correct?

A. In that — in that sense, yeah. Again, mine is a conference paper, so –

Q. This is a true peer reviewed paper, correct?

A. Correct.

This supposedly ‘peer-reviewed’ paper, then, was ‘conference reviewed’ and Scott Minnich doesn’t know who the Wessex Institute are.

By coincidence I came across the Wessex Institute a few weeks ago while reminding myself of that great hoax on the pretensions of the Social Sciences, the Sokal Affair.

The Wessex Institute of Technology (WIT) is associated with the University of Wales and organised the conference, ‘Design & Nature 2004′ in Rhodes, at which Minnich and Meyer’s paper was presented. As Minnich says, it was the WIT that provided the conference peer review. So what are the WIT’s peer review standards an proceudres?

Here’s an example:

A prior event which may also be compared to the Sokal affair involved the VIDEA 1995 conference, organized by the Wessex Institute of Technology. Professor Werner Purgathofer (Vienna University of Technology), a member of the VIDEA 1995 program committee, became suspicious of the conference’s peer review standards after not receiving any abstracts or papers for review. To confirm his suspicions, he wrote four absurd and/or nonsensical “abstracts” and submitted them to the conference. All were “reviewed and conditionally accepted.”[3] He subsequently resigned from the program committee.

Wikipedia on The Sokal Affair and the Wessex Institute of Technology

You can read more of Professor Purgathofer’s trenchant views on the Wessex Institute here.

The upshot of this one brief investigation, is that the paper, presented to an Engineering conference, was not, as the Discovery Institute wrongly claims, properly peer-reviewed. Anyone care to take a look at the rest of their claims on that page?

We run events and seminars for specific interest groups where people come together to learn about how the law can be used to help protect both personal and corporate reputations

Schillings, the legal representatives of Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov

The problem

Our client was a lardy foreign oligarch looking to take over a leading British football club. The former British Ambassador to his country had published allegations about him which he considered to be false and defamatory.

The solution

We put the frighteners on the former Ambassador’s webhost to such an extent that it shut down not only his blog, but also other high profile blogs which had nothing to do with it, including that of the Conservative candidate for London mayor, and others in elected office. The allegations then spread around the internet and the mainstream media like wildfire.

Bloggeheads: The Alisher Usmanov Affair

The majority language in Wales (pop. 3 million) is English. Despite compulsory Cymraeg lessons until the age of sixteen for everybody attending a State-run school in Wales – although not for those attending privately run schools – only about a fifth of the population of Wales speak the ancient tongue, a Brythonic branch of the Celtic family of languages which used to be spoken natively in the principality. The vast majority of residents of Wales simply cannot speak and don’t use Cymraeg in their day-to-day life.

That’s why the awkwardly bilingual website of the Campaign for Racial Equality (CRE) in Wales – which repeats content by swapping between the two languages in successive paragraphs – has English the first paragraph, the Cymraeg equivalent in the second, and so on.

Oh no, wait a bit, it’s the other way around. For some reasons the CRE in Wales leads with the minority language, Cymraeg, which isn’t understood by 80% of the population of the Principality.

Anyway, the CRE is taking legal action against a man for organising a petition objecting to a travellers’ site.

There is already one widely-accepted official encampment in the area. Mr Carl Lewis was organising a petition against the unofficial and illegal use of a carpark as a caravan park by the travellers. The response of the CRE has been to instruct lawyers to start proceedings against him under the Race Relations Act.

Popular Welsh blogger and Lib Dem member of the Welsh Assembly, Peter Black, said,

the prosecution of local residents who are using legitimate and democratic means to bring their concerns to the attention of the local council will set a dangerous and unwelcome precedent

There are fundamental freedom of speech issues here that are not helped by the CRE’s own inconsistency

Peter Black, AM, A peverse decision

Religion, you gotta love it.

Lunatic Catholics strike again: the head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with HIV deliberately.

Dhimmitude postponed: a Muslim dentist from Greater Manchester has been found guilty of telling a female patient she could not register with him unless she wore an Islamic headscarf.

Googling Craig Murray censored suggests that Alisher Usmanov, who was once jailed for six years, and his lawyers, Schilling, may not quite have achieved their aims. I wonder how fans of Arsenal Football Club are feelings.

A coroner called yesterday for bravery awards to be given to passersby who tried to save a flood victim in central Sheffield.

Three men struggled to save Peter Harding, 68, from freezing water which rose from waist to neck height within minutes after torrential rainfall in June.

Two of them, Christopher Brennan and Richard Tomlinson, tried to keep Mr Harding’s head above water, while the third, Darren Fogg, stripped off and swam beneath a bridge to haul him to dry land.

Coroner praises trio, The Guardian

Meanwhile, on another planet:

Police chiefs have defended two community support officers (PCSOs) who did not enter the water as a 10-year-old boy drowned in a pond.

The BBC, Police defend drowning death case

“Israel, like most of its Western allies, regards Hamas as an unreconstructed terrorist organisation bent on the destruction of the Jewish state.”

That’s absolutely right Jeremy. Just as we regard a large, grey, four-legged mammal with a long trunk and big ears as an elephant.

From Biased BBC

After the BBC’s Newsround 9/11 Guide for Children to the events of 9/11 came under fire and despite the pathetic defence made by Sinead Rocks Newsround’s editor, the guide has been changed. So, for example, where it used to read:

On 11 September 2001 armed people took control of four planes that were flying above the US.

it now reads:

On 11 September 2001 Islamic fanatics hijacked four planes that were flying above the US.

Of course, the original story, the lie about its origin and the circumstances of it’s appearing on the BBC’s website, and defence of it by the Newsround Editor all just bear out Andrew Marr’s observation:

The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias

but what a shame a large part of the liberal left’s response to 9/11 has been to shack up with Islamic theocratic fascists. Apparently operating under the slogan that my enemy’s enemy is my friend – and with the US firmly identified as the enemy – in the BBC terrorists are called militants and fanatical hijackers are called armed people.

The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil

Jeremy Paxman, James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, 2007