Silent Dave

deadman_932 and Occam's Aftershave, among others, have already demolished the points raised in this post. I will simply make five observations.

1) An accusation framed as a rhetorical question is still an accusation, and can legally still be considered libel.

2) Since you obviously haven't contacted the peer review committee, or even the scientists themselves, to see whether the questions have been addressed prior to the article's publication, you've demonstrated a reckless disregard for the truth or falsehood of your accusations.

3) Even more so, since you have simply assumed that NO ONE has asked the questions, instead of asking whether the peer review committee had. So not only have you slandered the scientists, but by accusing the PRC of not asking these questions, which is their job, and suggesting that this omission was deliberate, to further an ulterior motive (see number 1), you've slandered the PRC as well.

4) Instead of proving the truth of your allegations, which as I pointed out is an absolute defense against a libel charge, you've tried to escape on a technicality, by reframing your accusation as a series of rhetorical questions instead of allegations. This suggests to anyone reading this thread that you are incapable of proving the truth of your allegations.

5) You might want to call a lawyer.


Dave

ck1

I am curious, Dave, how do you think peer-review works and how do you think it should work? What do you think peer reviewers do or should do when evaluating the work of others?

From my perspective, there are limits to peer review. Scientists selected as peer reviewers look only at manuscripts submitted for publication and can evaluate:

-the technical and statistical methods used
-whether the results are clearly reported and make sense
-whether the stated conclusions are supported by the results
-the novelty of the findings and importance to the field
-the appropriateness of the work for the particular journal
-the appropriate acknowledgement of previous work in the field

Reviewers also point out problems with the readability of figures and English usage.

Reviewers do not visit the labs whose work is being reviewed for a journal, nor do they attempt to reproduce the experiments. They can, and often do, request that additional experiments be done if there are questions about the data, or the methods used, but they must provide a really good reason to make such demands.

"Anomalous' findings, to reiterate CM's comment, are not findings that fail to meet your preconceptions and therefore challenge existing theories - they generally represent a rare failure to reproduce multiple other tests of the same phenomenon and are usually suspect for technical reasons.

On the other hand, reproducible results that challenge existing theories or "preconceptions" are not automatically rejected as you seem to think - but they are given extra scrutiny, because obviously, unusual findings must be very well supported.

Constant Mews

And here Dave demonstrates an almost complete ignorance of the history of science to add to his complete ignorance of the facts and methodology of science.

The fact that the world is far more than ten thousand years old was discovered, confirmed, and established in perpetuity by Christians. Not atheists, not Buddhists, not Muslims.

Christians. Christians proved that Genesis is not a historical record. Christians proved that radiocarbon dating worked. Christians confirmed Darwin's theory. Christians established the fundamentals of geology that disproved the flood.

Christians proved that you're wrong, Dave. Christians. To claim that any rejection of a literal reading of Genesis is somehow based on atheism is - not to put too fine a point on it - insane.

And a Christian has just eviscerated you in debate.

Silent Dave

Poor Dave -- it must be tough to live in a world where every single instance of dating, by any method whatsoever, that yields a date of more than 6,000 years is anomalous. Perhaps it's for the best that Dave has never done any honest research into the matter. He'd quickly go insane.

But then again, there's that subtle joke that someone else mentioned: What do you call an honest creationist? Answer: an evolutionist.

Jayco

How apropos.

Dave Hawkins

To be honest, I don't know how peer review works exactly. I have never seen it firsthand. My point though, in the debate, was that the burden of proof was on CM to demonstrate that these questions had been asked by someone and had been satisfactorily answered. He was supposed to be demonstrating, after all, that Genesis is false. It seems that if people like Silent Dave are so sure that this paper establishes a deep timescale, they would be scrambling to point me to all the answers to my questions which supposedly have already been answered, instead of getting all uppity about how I'm tarnishing their reputations with slander while at the same time turning a blind eye to the daily slander against creationist scientists that goes on multiple times every day here and at other skeptic forums. How much more two-faced can one get than that?

improvius

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the point of the debate was for CM to convince you that his position was correct.

Constant Mews

Then any comments you make about it are meaningless - much like your comments on the research points that I told you can be answered by contacting the researchers themselves. All it takes to do that is time and perseverance.Not in the slightest. Peer-review guarantees that the questions you asked had been answered. The entirety of dendrochronological study; the discipline of varve counts; the methodology of ice-core dating are well understood by anyone who has taken the time to examine them. Apparently you didn't bother to do that. As I pointed out earlier, Dave, your utter and complete ignorance of debate and debate procedure have tripped you up and make you look not unlike a fool. You are expected to educate yourself in the science points; I am expected to educate you in the debate argument - which I did quite thoroughly.And I have - quite conclusively. Genesis is not valid as a historical record because its timeframe is completely false, the six-day creation week did not happen; and the flood did not occur.

Got that? The flood did not occur. Lake Suigetsu definitively proves that.

You have been provided with the answers. I answered your questions in the debate, I answered them again above. For you to claim that they have not been answered is fundamentally dishonest.

And every creationist scientist is either an idiot or a liar. Every single one without exception.

I'll even debate you on that one. Game to have your butt kicked again?

I didn't think so. :devil1:

ck1

My post above explains what reviewers look for when reviewing journal articles. The process works like this: The journal editor reviews the submitted paper initially to make sure it meets minimum standards, and then selects at least 2 reviewers who are experts in the field to do a detailed review. Based on the reviewers' detailed written comments the editor decides to accept or reject the paper. Few papers are accepted outright, most have to be revised in accordance with reviewers' comments. The process is more rigorous or less rigorous depending on the journal. High impact journals like Nature reject the majority of submitted papers.

And of course, peer-review works somewhat differently for grant review.
For any published study, none of the correspondence among the authors, editors and reviewers leading up to publication is made public. The reviewers are anonymous. Readers of any scientific paper can assume that published papers in reputable journals have gone through a thorough review before publication and that errors and inconsistencies have been corrected. It is true that sometimes errors are published - in those cases, authors publish corrections and in rare cases, retractions.
I think others were pointing out that rather than produce substantive criticisms of the published work (not liking the result is not a substantive criticism), you were suggesting some sort of deliberate attempt to hide discordant data or otherwise mislead.

Silent Dave

He has done so -- and if he hasn't, I do so now -- simply by pointing to the existence of the peer review process. Any dissatisfaction you may have with that response stems from your own admitted ignorance about said process, and not with the response itself.


And he succeeded. Your scientific solipsism doesn't make it otherwise.


Pointing out the existence of the peer review committee wasn't much of a scramble, and indeed wouldn't even have been necessary if you had at least some inkling of how real science works. But in any case, it is done, any burden of proof I might have had has been fulfilled, and if you want further work done in that regard, get off your ass and do it yourself.



I say this for the third time: proving the truth of one's claims is an absolute defense against libel (and slander). Just because you're incapable of doing that doesn't mean that we are.


Dave