New Jerry Smith

I think the fake-paper idea is excellent. I wouldn't worry about introducing new false claims to circulate for years later among creationists. Reading Chase's and a few other articles from TJ, it seems clear that recycling the current garbage is quite acceptable.

I would not, however, include made-up references. That is probably all the "review board" actually does: make a quick library run, with a once-over to see that there is something that could be construed as support in the paper, letter, or review article that is cited.

Instead, I would use a few of the standard staples, referencing Gould about "stasis", or what not, but throw in a few like this:

Genetic studies have falsified very specific predictions of evolutionary theory. (1)

(1) Safarti, J., Refuting Evolution, p. 83

Of course the reference is to alpha hemoglobin in crocodiles being closer to birds than to snakes. This would get past the reviewers without any questions, but is a major boo-boo in a number of ways. A few items of this nature would be enough to severely embarrass TJ.

Secular Pinoy

Yeah, submit a fake article like what Alan Sokal did.

Ladislau

I love the first paragraph from the first URL in the message that started this thread:

"Who ever said that science journals are just for highly trained Ph.D. scientists? That’s certainly not the case with TJ—the in-depth Journal of Creation. "

No argument from me.

Valentine Pontifex

But merely paroting their dogma will not do. Of course hemoglobin from crocs is close to birds than to snakes.
Saying that evolution predicts the oppose -- no matter how false it is -- does not appear to embarrass AiG whatsoever.

The falsehood would have to major error (no nitpicking), it would have to be something that even AiG will have utterly no choice but to admit it is an error, it would have to be something that Joe Sixpack can easily understand without lengthy explanation, and it would something which 90% of people would agree that it would have been caught if a meaningful review process was involved.

In short it would have to demonstrate extreme gullibility on their part. Anything less and AiG wins. Frankly setting up the fake fundamentalism would take a minimum of a year and would require a large commitment of time during that year: and that is before the article is submitted. Frankly I can't see anyone good enough to pull it off really wanting to put in the effort. And then there are the ethical issues which are not trivial either.

Ladislau

Go to ISCID, scarf a copy of the CTMU, put another name on it and submit it to AIG and see if they fall for it too.

Valentine Pontifex

Gee that is silly. You are assuming that no one at AiG ever reads ISCID. You are also assuming that no one at AiG is capable of performing Google searches.

Sorry but AiG is not going to fall for a silly plagiarism from the web.

Also the person who did this would be quite rightly a target of a possible lawsuit. Taking someone's writings and trying to get them published is a major violation of copyright laws. Also AiG like most any other publisher is probably have its authors sign off that they are the original author and copyright owner. This could lead AiG to sue the plagiarist as well. Violating such a disclaimer, putting them in jeopardy of facing a copyright lawsuit, and tarnishing their reputations would provide ample grounds. And since AiG would have the facts, the law, and morality on their side in such a suit, I would be forced to say that they should win.

RufusAtticus

Well Chase and I are exchanging emails, and I gave his paper a further review today. I am really kicking myself from wigging out on giving his paper a full review when he first showed it to me. :banghead: If anything this shows just how lax AiG/TJ's review actually is. Here is the email I sent him.

==================================

Hi Chase,

You are right, I never did finish my response to you. I got busy with classes and papers and so I put it aside. I figured you were going to put it up on your website with your other articles, and I could get in touch with you later.

I think the major problem with your article is that it argues that humans went through a bottleneck, but doesn’t provide any of the known information about the timing and size of that bottleneck. See chapter 3, in John Avise's book, Phylogeography. For example, he states on page 114

"From reanalyses of the mtDNA data, A.C. Wilson et al. suggested that the evolutionary effective population size of human females may have been [approximately] 6,000. Takahata (1993) summarized evidence that the effective size was [approximately] 10,000 over the past one million years, and that the population 'has never dripped to a few individuals, even in a single generation.' Ayala (1995a) refers to the earlier confusion of gene-tree coalescence with an extreme population bottleneck as 'the myth of Eve.'"

Because of various issues with mtDNA, it is best to complement it with demographic data retrieved from nuclear markers, which if I recall is something that is missing from your paper, other than the LD discussion. The nuclear data suggests that the effective ancestral population size of humans was approximately 10,000, with no bottleneck smaller than 4,000 individuals in a single generation. On page 134, Avise summarizes three points that come out of mtDNA and nuclear phylogenies.
a) "[T]he evolutionary effective population size of our species has been on the order of a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of individuals."
b) "[A] pronounced population expansion occurred probably in the late Pleistocene."
c) "Africa is the likely source of what may be surprisingly recent global expansion of our species."

I've looked at Weiland's paper and it is atrocious. For one thing he doesn’t understand coalescence, which happens not because of bottlenecks or small population sizes, but because drift occurs in populations with finite sizes. It does happen with nuclear DNA although he presents it like it does not. His explanation of coalescence might be partially accurate for mtDNA and yDNA, but it still off. I'll offer you a genetic example to see if it helps.

Let's say we start out with a population of 6 individuals (12 genes) and the population size stays constant. Now when they reproduce to form the next generation, by chance some of these 12 genes might not be passed on. So in the next generation of the original 12 genes, only 10 or 11 remain. The population reproduces again and more genes are lost, say only 9 of the original genes remain. This will continue until only one of the original 12 genes are left. Here are the results of an example I wrote in Excel. Each line is a generation, and each cell represents a gene. As you can see, only the "1" gene, or rather its descendents, remains in the population after thirty or so generations.

[snip table]

Now if this happens when going forward in time, it also happens going backwards. In other words, those twelve genes coalesce at some point in the past and share a common ancestral gene.

Wieland makes some claims about the results of Parsons et al. (1997), although I suspect that he only read the Gibbon's report on it, which you also referenced. There has been a lot of debate of Parsons et al. (1997) results in the scientific literature. Pedigree mutation rates do differ from phylogenetic mutation rates in the control region. Therefore, it is mistaken to argue that pedigree mutation rates are reprehensive of phyologenetic mutation rates, which is what Wieland suggests. I recommend that you look at the recent paper by Howell et al. (Howell et al. 2003. "The pedigree rate of sequence divergence in the human mitochondrial genome: There is a difference between phylogenetic and pedigree rates" AJHG 72 (3): 659-670)

One problem with your reference to Gibbons (1993) is that you don't explain how it is consistent with the ToB story, and ignore the dates offered in the article for these events which aren't consistent. I also would argue that the Gibbons article is out dated. Perhaps the recent review by Excoffier would be more suitable: Excoffier (2002) "Reconstructing the demography of prehistoric human populations from molecular data" EVOL. ANTH. 11: 166-170 Suppl. 1 2002. You also didn't address the data from human genetics that is inconstant with a global diaspora from a signal central point in the middle east. A diaspora from a single point would produce a star phylogeny. However, what we see in the human population is that virtually all the variation is found in Africa, and the rest of the world is a small sub-set of this variation. The data shows that humans migrated out from Africa and gradually colonized the rest of the world. Amerindian data supports this well because they are more closely related to north-east Asian populations. However, the ToB explanation cannot account for this. (See Zhivotovsky et al. 2003 "Features of evolution and expansion of modern humans, inferred from genomewide microsatellite markers." AJHG 72 (5): 1171-1186).

I also didn't see you offer any justification for the following statements.

"Mutations should have produced much more diversity than 0.1% over millions of years."

"Evolutionary models of origins did not predict such low human genetic diversity."

"This study concluded with the possibility that 50 individuals may have founded the entire population of Europe. This evidence is also quite consistent with a historical global flood."

Although you claim that the Reich et al. paper is consistent with biblical events, how do account for their statement "Our simulations show that a severe bottleneck (inbreeding coefficient F >= 0.2) occurring 800–1,600 generations ago (about 27,000–53,000 years ago assuming 25 years per generation) could have generated the LD observed" which follows right after the quote you give? It seems obvious that such results are inconsistent with a YEC timeframe. Also as I read the paper it is more suggestive not of a "European" bottleneck, but of an "Out-of-Africa" bottleneck.

I'm sorry I didn't take the time to get into this with you earlier. There are many mistakes and oversights in the paper accepted by AiG. I would really like to continue this dialog with you and see you address them.

Doubting Didymus

Bravo, Rufus. I think you're doing a great service.

New Jerry Smith

Rufus -- that is awesome. And it suggests another line of approach to effectively dismantle TJ and other creationist claims of "peer review".

Systematically review a certain few papers that already appear in TJ or its ICR equivalent, and publish the reviews in a T.O. FAQ. There are enough competent, practicing scientists around here familiar with the review process (and at least a few who have reviewed for journals) - that it would be trivial to do a few short review that points out all of the problems that got past reviewers at TJ.

Once the FAQ is up, any claims of creationist peer review can easily be answered by showing that creationist peer review is inexcusably uncritical.

Outblaze

Can anyone locate this article:

Harkins, R.N., Stenzel, P. and Black, J.A. Noah’s haemoglobin. Nature 241:226.

Chase's article footnoted (#4) and linked to another AiG article by Don Batten on Y-Chromosone Adam. Here Batten footnotes the Nature article (#5), but I'm unable to track it down. It's referenced in the context that researchers at the University of Oregon Medical School pointed out that Noah's flood would have provided a population bottleneck due to the variation in human haemoglobin.