On Peer Review (Bric-a-Brac 2)

This really isn't suitable for another "On Science" post as it's really not concerned much with the intersection between science and faith in the sense the previous posts were.  But of course when it rains it pours, and in listening to the radio this morning, there was a really interesting news bit about peer review and publication retractions.

They referenced an interesting site, Retraction Watch, which provides a sort of monitoring service for paper retractions.  There was an interesting note in the media segment in which a contributor mentioned a study on retracted papers.  The study found that after a paper was retracted from Science or Nature, future papers still cited the retracted paper 17 times more than the retraction.


There's a question here about whether peer review is really doing its job.  Even assuming retractions happen because of current work (rather than fraud or more nefarious reasons), it's interesting that publications more frequently cite discredited research than the research discrediting it.

This reminded me some of the 2009 East Anglia global warming scandal, at least insofar as that scandal did more damage to peer review than it did to anything else.

In the final analysis, at the very least it suggests that we ought be more careful about quoting science and studies without being careful about their contents—and what's most recently been discovered.

More Science Bric-a-Brac

A couple quick hits for consideration.

The first is a post by Dr. Jay Wile titled "Science can't prove anything." This is a pretty critical point, and one I have tried to make in the past when I say that science is fundamentally undecidable. I borrowed that term from computer science, but the principle is basically the same. Science can tell us when something is wrong, but not when something is right. The idea that we've arrived at the Right Solution to Life the Universe and Everything is plausible only in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The second is a topic I may revisit later, which is that science (as a body of knowledge) is not the same thing as natural revelation, although the two may be related. Revelation is the sort of thing that someone has to tell you, as opposed to the sort of thing you can find out for yourself. So when we say that the heavens reveal the glory of God, we are saying that it is a way for God to tell you something about himself that you wouldn't have otherwise known. The reason we call it "natural" as opposed to "special" revelation is that it is a general communication by God to all mankind. Special revelation, on the other hand, is what happens when God communicates to a specific group of people. (More precise definitions may follow as I grow my thoughts on the subject.)

On the Reliability of the New Testament

Rey pointed me to a set of interesting MP3s. There are some good things here; it's worthwhile to listen to.