I decided to submit a paper to the journal Bioscience which is run by the American Institute for Biological sciences. I supported the academic freedom bills that allow "supplemental material" to be presented the in classroom in addition to the standard textbooks. The manuscript was predictably rejected but the reviewers did provide a lot of comments:


Reviewer: 1
Comments to the Author
This paper addresses issues that are politically salient within science education policy, but fails to address the literature most germane to such a discussion. Although I feel this article is in need of major revision before for considering it for publication, there are a few strong points I encourage the author to better flesh out before resubmission. I treat this review page by page, focusing on major conceptual problems, as follows:

P.3.
"Perhaps the most contentious issue facing contemporary education and public policy in the
West is over the teaching of the theory of evolution in the science classroom"

This is simply a spurious claim. It may certainly be as such for scientists, and perhaps science educators, but education in general? In the US, closing achievement gaps between ethnic groups or providing adequate funding across all schooling systems/districts are certainly more salient issues. Most people, in their day-to-day lives never think about things such as evolution.

P.4
"... many important areas of the theory do remain very controversial and have certainly not been
settled..." The idea that any theory will ever be finally 'settled' is to hold science up as establishing final truth, which it (depending on your philosophy of science) does not have access. Science, unlike the certain fundamentalist theology that orients Creationists and those promulgating the Louisiana law at question, is permanently open to paradigmatic revision. Part of normal scientific discourse involves intensely heated discussion of the details of 'normal' science. By this reviewer's experience, we are in an age of working out the detail of evolution as 'normal' science, not standing on the edge of a paradigmatic revision in favor of ID concepts such as irreducible complexity, etc.

"It is specious to teach students that all of these identified problems no longer exist, as some appear to recommend, although this does not mean that they will forever remain unsolved or that no “natural” explanation is in any way possible".

No, it really is not, as everyday science education at the K-12 level does not delve into this degree of detail for each topic. The time to do so simply does not exist. This is, by my estimation to work of graduate education in science. As a former school science teacher, I begin to question the author's command of the realities and philosophical parameters of K-12 school science teaching. Did the author teach K-12 science in the US? Anywhere? By my experience, no teacher, understanding the pragmatic time constraints of teaching, would write this way.

P.5
The author ignores the political motivation of the bill. The bill is motivated by religious conservatives looking to ultimately eliminate evolution from the curriculum. This has been made clear enough in Louisiana by Louisiana State University science educators and NCSE reviews which follow the motivations that brought this bill onto the table. It is plainly disingenuous to suppose that politically and theologically conservative Louisiana legislators (themselves with little or no scientific credentials) acted, in bringing forth the bill, in the name of high quality science education through high-minded philosophical parsing.

"This is precisely why the Louisiana science education act, and similar bills proposed based upon
its stipulations, are productive in that they stimulate students and expose them to the
internal debates and counter-currents within science that they may not otherwise be aware
of. After all, it is only through critical evaluation and reasoning that alternatives to the null
hypothesis are proposed..."

While this section gets more to the issue, American K-12 education is not a hotbed of dialectical instruction. This also brings up both a potential strength, but for now , the most serious flaw of this paper—its omission of any understanding of the American educational force, their religious commitments, the extensive educational literature on this, and the issues of developmentally appropriate curricula. More on this later, but the author is positing that American high school students will, on whole, be familiar the molecular biology to an extent that they can reason through marginal 'theories' such as ID/irreducible complexity, versus the orthodoxy of current biology.

P.6-7
"As such, there is inferred a minimal and irreducible amount of complex genetic information necessary to sustain the most basic free-living cell. It is important for students to understand this concept and its implications"

Why? In principle, if there were a body of publications to lend a shift on our paradigmatic understanding of things, then yes. In practice, no—for now. There exists no such 'body' of literature worth mention. Citing Behe and yourself does not cut muster.

P.8
"But since then the presence of articles, either supporting alternative interpretations or just
critical of the consensus view, has grown to the point where it can no longer be dismissed
as irrelevant by educators and researchers alike."

Has it? This is certainly an interpretation by the author that I would reject. I dismiss it, as it has not reached a point where I, and every one of my science colleagues am convinced.

"The danger exists, however, that laws like the LSEA might allow material that is sub-standard, biased or misleading to be used".

Right. That has always been the case. In practice, this is what Creationist teachers do—bring non-science 'research' from their churches into the classroom. This paper, for some inexplicable reason, completely ignores the literature of teachers who, based on religious rationales, eliminate evolution from the curriculum. I would encourage the author to investigate the literature on the sociology of education and motivational intent of the law, the teaching force regarding these topics, etc.

"While popular science may be more accessible to both students and educators than some very technical journal articles, it is just not rigorous enough"

Rigorous enough for what? Much of what students learn about science is in informal contexts, shaped by home and church communities, museums, zoos, and based around individual interest. You give the US teaching profession much more credit than is due for its familiarly with professional literature. This just doesn't happen. Your argument hangs on this, which makes it fail.

"Instead of seeking to repeal science education acts, and stymie the passage of similar bills,
it would be more prudent for all concerned to agree to amend the wording of legislation to
safeguard academic standards. Any pedagogical platform for the critical evaluation of
scientific theories on such subjects as the origins of life or the universe should be based on
the relevant academic literature."

Right, and for now, there is no compelling reason to foresee a paradigm shift on the horizon overturning the modern synthesis in favor of ID, etc. The literature needed to do this, by the author's own standards, does not exist.

P. 9
"It should instead be made clear that there are no real “facts” or “proofs” in science, but rather
only empirical observations and the necessary interpretations that are made from them."

You really misreading the rhetorical politics and inputs into student lives, as it pertains to religion and science.

"This is regretful because the classroom should not be used as a battleground to settle political scores and which attracts too much notice".

Education is a political act. Isn't it? How could it not be? Education, as a matter of improvement, has everything to do with foisting and fostering normative values and claims. It is simply the case that the normative value of Creationism has been rejected by almost all scientists.

"Journal articles are where scientific research is announced and these findings are reviewed – it is important for teachers to describe just how science works"

The normative claim you're making here, one that I agree with, overreaches in its understanding of K-12 science curriculum. The kind of distinction—one about the foundation of science and understanding the limits of its philosophy—simply has never been done well in K-12 education. This is not to say that it shouldn't be.


I encourage the author to focus, on reworking this piece, on the final point I single out here—the role of science teacher in reading, discerning, and employing professional literature into their practice. I will warn that within the science education, literature, there is a tremendous gap between research based policy and practice.


Reviewer: 2
Comments to the Author
The goal of the present manuscript seems to be to advance a creationist agenda rather than to improve scientific education. As such it must be rejected for publication here.

It might seem a bit unfair to review the paper with only such a concise summary, although that is all that is required here. However, a few comments may help in case there is conflict between reviews. (These might help with revision in other cases, but I regard this paper as not salvageable for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.)

One thesis of the manuscript is that high school teachers may use articles from the peer-reviewed technical literature in teaching their classes. This is glaringly obvious and, indeed, is frequently done. This does not require any legislative act to authorize it nor does it need any further discussion in print.

The manuscript also has a second thesis. It suggests that teachers should use especially those articles from the areas of ongoing research into evolutionary transitions. This seems to me to be patently mistaken. Understanding the significance of such articles typically would require more scientific expertise than the students can reasonably be expected to acquire in the time that is likely to be available for an advanced topic in an already too packed curriculum. It also would require more cognitive complexity that can be reasonably assumed for the age of students that usually take high school biology.

In saying this, I do not wish to suggest that a few teachers might not wish to develop a unit that provided sufficient support for such understanding nor that that they might not be able to be successful. This might be especially true for some advanced electives in high school science. However, nothing in the manuscript suggests that the author envisions embedding the articles in a well-structured unit that really helps the students understand the significance of the articles either the nature of science or evolution. But such careful structure is the only scientifically and pedagogically sound way to deal with articles that move outside the mainstream consensus. Kelly (2009, cited below) is a nice example of using conflicting readings to deepen students’ understanding of these topics.

Rather, the author is suggesting at least implicitly that by selecting only a particular type of article, teachers who wish to obfuscate or question the force of evolution can do so in a way that might pass constitutional muster. I think that this is false if used in the way that the author suggests.

The problems here are even deeper. The author seriously misrepresents at least some of the material cited.

At the highest level the author states: “During the Kitzmiller versus Dover trial (Lebo 2008), one of the main arguments used against intelligent design, and other unconventional ideas, was that their proponents do not publish related research in the (sic) peer-reviewed journals. This was probably the strongest reason why the presiding judge ruled against Dover high school and the advocacy of intelligent design as being scientific.” The strongest reason was that the judge found that ID relied on supernatural explanations and was thus religious and not scientific. Publication in peer-reviewed journals was only a piece of the other resaons. As summarized succinctly by Kelly (2009): (1) “ID was judged to be religious rather than scientific.” (2) “ID was also judged not to be science because it has “failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community” (Jones, 2005, p. 89).” And (3) “The court also found that the primary argument for ID, Michael Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity (Behe, 1996) ‘has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large….’ ” (All from: Kelly, P. H. (2009) A College Honors Seminar on Evolution and Intelligent Design: Successes and Challenges. Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 9, No. 2, 29-37).

As a second example, the author cites in isolation a line from Monteiro and Podlaha (2009) that “the genetic origin of new and complex traits is probably still one of the most pertinent and fundamental unanswered questions in evolution today.” This sentence is taken from the last of the two paragraphs in the concluding section entitled “Toward a solution.” This section reads:
“There is still much to do in order to fully understand how novel complex traits evolve. Here we propose an experimental framework that will allow us to test whether novel traits evolve from pre-existing genetic networks. In order to do this, it is important to continue exploring the full complement of genes that are shared across multiple traits to identify gene clusters that may be behaving as an integrated and context-insensitive network of genes [20,39]. For those traits that appear to share a common network, it is then important to ask whether the similarities extend to a shared regulatory hierarchy and function within the network. If this is the case, then the next step is to target genes that appear to be in the middle of the putatively shared network and look at their wiring details. The CREs of these genes, identifiable with transgenic tools, should be tested for multiple expression domains across a variety of developmental contexts where network co-option is suspected. If the same CRE drives gene expression in the different structures, network co-option is the likely mechanism; if they don’t, the network was likely built de novo.
This work is difficult and time consuming, but the question at its core—the genetic origin of new and complex traits—is probably still one of the most pertinent and fundamental unanswered questions in evolution today. At stake is the possibility of testing whether novel complex traits arise from a gradual building of novel developmental networks, gene by gene, or whether pre-existent modules of interacting genes are recruited together to play novel roles in novel parts of the organism.”

The pedagogical question with this paper is whether a teacher wants allocate time sufficient to help the students understand how the proposed experimental framework would allow scientists to test key major alternative hypotheses for the origin of new and complex traits. The sentence quoted when lifted out of context gives exactly the opposite meaning from the meaning of the thrust of the paper and of its scientific significance: ‘Here is where we are and here is how to make further progress on this topic.’ If this paper were used without the support necessary to understand the science in it, students would be easily led to focus only on the problem statement without understanding the science. But the purpose of science classes surely is to help students understand the science in any material assigned to them.

As a final example of misdirection, the author cites Behe (2010) as “an insightful review article.” But Behe’s review articles in the past have been pedagogically useful only when discussed in the context of other articles that put their misleading claims into context, reversing the significance of his arguments, and I assume that this will continue to be true. The author makes no note of this important history. To be specific, Behe (2003) should be discussed together with Miller (2003), and with articles such as Pallen and Matzke (2006).
Behe, M. J. (2003). The modern intelligent design hypothesis: Breaking rules. In N. A. Manson (Ed.), God and design: The teleological argument and modern science (pp. 277-291). Routledge.
Miller, K. R. (2003). Answering the biochemical argument from design. In N. A. Manson (Ed.), God and design: The teleological argument and modern science (pp. 292-307). Routledge.
Pallen M. J., & Matzke N. J. (2006) From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella. Nature reviews. Immunology 4:784–90.


Reviewer: 3
Comments to the Author
The manuscript falls short of the standard expected in a serious academic publication. The presentation of the literature is misleading - the presentation of challenges to the mainstream view are presented without adequate context - for example, it leaves the reader with the mistaken idea that the origin of "new and complex traits" is something that leaves scientists scratching their heads when, in fact, it's an idea that's the subject of an extensive literature. The style used in this article is may be appropriate for expository writing, but not in a journal like BioScience.

Another problem with the manuscript it is actually misleading in places. The quote from Montiero and Podlaha (2009) [p. 4, lines 8-11] is presented in such a way that it is likely to convey to the reader something entirely other than what the authors wrote. While the manuscript presents this (intentionally or unintentionally) as if it were an inexplicable problem, the authors are actually discussing future avenues for research.

Problems like this exist throughout the manuscript. In addition, on page 9, you state that it is "unsupported to suppose that this will confuse pupils". The truth is that there is a literature in science education; rather than issue a blanket dismissal, it would be appropriate to discuss this in the context of that literature.

Overall, this manuscript is structured as an expository essay, not a journal article. The coverage of the literature tends to be misleading, and it lacks the nuance that is essential to scientific communication.

What were you expecting the reviewers to say?

They got you pegged, eh?

Atheistoclast wrote:Overall, this manuscript is structured as an expository essay, not a journal article. The coverage of the literature tends to be misleading, and it lacks the nuance that is essential to scientific communication.

Apparently, your paper bears an eerie resemblance to Kent Hovind's dissertation. No wonder it got rejected.

What did you take away from this Joe?

Your paper got hammered.

Have you posted it anywhere?

Reviewers comments were probably as long as the original paper! Given that some of these comments point to a woeful standard of scholarship in the original paper, one wonders about the educational background of the author.

campermon wrote:Your paper got hammered.

Have you posted it anywhere?

No, because I plan on resubmitting it to another journal.

It is interesting that the first reviewer admits that American education is so bad that there couldn't possibly be scope for allowing dialectical instruction and critical evaluation in the classroom. As far as I am concerned, without inculcating this into the minds of students, they will end up being poor scientists with limited ability to reason and understand.

Made of Stars wrote::coffee:

What did you take away from this Joe?

I knew they would reject it. I was curious to see how they would respond. The second reviewer admitted that anything resembling a creationist argument is anathema to the educational establishment. It doesn't matter if there is any evidence for it or not.

It seems like some identify creationism with fascism, racism, homophobia and other politically incorrect views.

Atheistoclast wrote:

campermon wrote:Your paper got hammered.

Have you posted it anywhere?

No, because I plan on resubmitting it to another journal.

It is interesting that the first reviewer admits that American education is so bad that there couldn't possibly be scope for allowing dialectical instruction and critical evaluation in the classroom. As far as I am concerned, without inculcating this into the minds of students, they will end up being poor scientists with limited ability to reason and understand.

I think you missed his point though. I took away that he didn't have faith in US education teaching the science properly so that if a discussion on fairytail origins came up, students would not be able to distinguish between the science and the myth.

Atheistoclast wrote:

campermon wrote:Your paper got hammered.

Have you posted it anywhere?

No, because I plan on resubmitting it to another journal.

It is interesting that the first reviewer admits that American education is so bad that there couldn't possibly be scope for allowing dialectical instruction and critical evaluation in the classroom. As far as I am concerned, without inculcating this into the minds of students, they will end up being poor scientists with limited ability to reason and understand.

I agree, the american populace has been stupefied with religious nutbaggery for way too long.

Atheistoclast wrote:

Made of Stars wrote::coffee:

What did you take away from this Joe?

I knew they would reject it. I was curious to see how they would respond. The second reviewer admitted that anything resembling a creationist argument is anathema to the educational establishment. It doesn't matter if there is any evidence for it or not.

It seems like some identify creationism with fascism, racism, homophobia and other politically incorrect views.

That's because it inexorably leads to it, when people start thinking bronze-age myths constitute established facts handed down by an all-knowing magic male, the next step is to try and make sense of all the slaughter, racism, rape, tribalism and homophobia said myths contain. Categorically, the more fundamentalist religious parts of society are also the most prejudiced, ignorant and hateful. It never fails.

Thanks for posting in full Clastie, the responses were hilarious. Made my day.

Well Clastie, what did you expect fullsome praise?

The reviewers seem to have you bang to rights.

The next question, Atheistoclast, is will you take the opportunity to learn something from the reviewers about your writing style, about your quote-mining, and about how utterly incorrect your assertions are? Or will you simply entrench yourself more firmly behind your wrong view of the world?

I know where my money is ...

Atheistoclast wrote:

Made of Stars wrote::coffee:

What did you take away from this Joe?

I knew they would reject it. I was curious to see how they would respond. The second reviewer admitted that anything resembling a creationist argument is anathema to the educational establishment. It doesn't matter if there is any evidence for it or not.

A dishonest method of explication when you didn't submit evidence for creationism.

Atheistoclast wrote:It seems like some identify creationism with fascism, racism, homophobia and other politically incorrect views.

I'd hazard a guess that they view it more like astrology, flat-earthism, and alchemy. Just wrong, not politically incorrect.

You've got to give them credit: we've had eons dealing with Joe's bullshit - they've not only identified it, but spelled out exactly what's going wrong on the viewing of just one paper! I'd guess that it was quite a paper!

Weaver wrote:The next question, Atheistoclast, is will you take the opportunity to learn something from the reviewers about your writing style, about your quote-mining, and about how utterly incorrect your assertions are? Or will you simply entrench yourself more firmly behind your wrong view of the world?

I know where my money is ...

I have to learn how people in authoritarian regimes express their views in the face of draconian censorship. They need to disguise and cloak them by using vague and ambiguous language. I need to be more savvy in this respect.

Oh, so you need to learn how to couch your religious claptrap in bullshit, so it's better swallowed by the credulous?

Why not just admit that you are wrong?