THIS squabble has become a mini-series with unintended consequences. The neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids) are now so far out of that “science closet” they’ve been hiding in that they can never go back again.
It began here: Thrilled About ClimateGate, but the Discoveroids couldn’t control themselves. Matters swiftly escalated to this: The Mask Falls Away. (Hey, that one post got almost 9,000 hits so far.) That’s where we identified the “vindication of all kooks” doctrine — which holds that if the legitimate views of global warming skeptics had been wrongly suppressed, then all science dissent has been similarly mistreated, and therefore the science-denial of creationism is now respectable.
But it didn’t stop there. The situation continued with Another ClimateGate — Creationism Coupling, and then it went into high gear: Frenzy in Seattle!
Now the Discoveroid hysteria has reached its inevitable climax. They’ve always tried to keep their theocratic goals a bit of a secret, although they’re disclosed in The Wedge Document so their dark purposes are generally known. But now that the Discoveroids believe they’re witnessing the collapse the “godless” edifice of science — the Final Days of science, as it were — they’ve become totally unrestrained.
We present to you, dear reader, some excerpts from Commenter Nails the Central Issue in ClimateGate: the Rigging of Peer-Review, which appears at the Discoveroid blog. The pretext for their latest blog entry isn’t terribly important, so we’ll skip over that. What matters are the Discoveroid remarks made in addition to the trivial substance of their article. Here are some excerpts, with bold added by us:
The pro-global warming blog Climate Change Denial is spinning like a top. Devastated by the revelation of pervasive fraud in climate science, the warmists are clearly dazed and grasping at any tactics that might salvage their ideological hijacking of science, now laid bare.
That’s now it begins. To the Discoveroids, the debate is over (so to speak). Let’s read on:
The most pervasive manifestation of this fraud is the perversion of the peer-review process; it renders all of the ‘consensus science’ that has accrued under that process essentially worthless. Peer review is to science as jury deliberations are to criminal justice. It is sacrosanct. If it is tampered with, the verdict — scientific or judicial — is worthless, and must be thrown out.
It’s long been observed that the Discoveroids’ “theory” about a magical mystery Designer hasn’t yet made an appearance in the peer-reviewed literature. The Discoveroid blogger is about to address that:
The peer-review process in evolutionary biology is at least as compromised as the peer-review process in climate science.
Oh? Here’s more:
There is no “consensus” when the deliberations are rigged. No scientific conclusion is valid unless the raw data on which it is based is available to all for inspection and replication, and no scientific conclusion is valid unless the peer-review process is free of coersion and of ideological bias
The Discoveroids have data? Who knew? They’ve been amazingly shy about presenting it. If they’ve been unfairly kept out of the recognized journals, they could nevertheless post their research at their own website. It’ll be seen. So where is it?
Moving along:
Is there ideological bias in evolutionary biology, as there obviously is in climate science? Perhaps we should ask the 98.7% of evolutionary biologists who don’t believe in a personal God that question.
See? We told you they were out of the closet.
Regardless of the merits of of that survey — and we suspect that the figure of 98.7% is way too high — we now see what the Discoveroids imagine has been the problem that prevents their ideas from being published in peer-reviewed journals. They have always seen themselves to be engaged in a religious struggle, and now they don’t care to conceal it any longer.
By the way, there’s no hint that this Discoveroid allegation of censorship by atheists is in any way connected to ClimateGate. Does anyone believe that global warming skeptics are the victims of an atheist conspiracy? No, of course not. Do the Discoveroids openly allege such a conspiracy? No, even they don’t go that far.
If the dots don’t connect, that doesn’t matter. Creationists don’t have to connect the dots. Here’s the end of the Discoveroid article:
It’s easy to get a ‘consensus’ when one side controls the jury. That’s a ‘show trial’, which is a succinct description of the peer review process in evolutionary biology as applied to intelligent design.
Ah yes, it’s those accursed atheists who are rigging the game against intelligent design. But if that‘s been the Discoveroids’ problem all along, how in the world do they plan to teach that controversy in science class?
Copyright © 2009. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
In other words, throw out all scientific consensus, and mandate teaching our bulls–t in public school science classes! Oh, if these guys weren’t so well funded they’d be funny.
You hit the nail on the head about their failure to post data (or any testable hypothesis, or proposed mechanism) on a web site. Even if they had prevailed at Dover, the cdesign proponentsists still wouldn’t have any more data in the scientific literature than they do today, i.e., nil.
Peer review is to science as jury deliberations are to criminal justice. It is sacrosanct. If it is tampered with, the verdict — scientific or judicial — is worthless, and must be thrown out.
Gotta love the fake analogies those guys come up with in order to convince themselves and their sheeples of the most ludicrous conclusions. Great stuff!
Well, there is Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design which was last published in November 2005.
There is also Origins and Design last published in Fall 2002.
And, let us not forget Robert Marks Journal of Evolutionary Informatics which has disappeared without ever publishing an issue.
carlsonjok, didn’t those defunct online journals amount to (borrowing from PZ) “complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity…therefore design?” At any rate, nothing they suggested could even sustain their own vanity journals, let alone lead to a hypothesis being tested in actual peer-reviewed journals,