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Joe Horton's avatar

"This practice violates scientific norms of submitting articles to journals anonymously to avoid potential bias."

Uh, no. If that were how things were done, no one would ever get anything published: how would the publishers know who to respond to? ~Reviewers~ are blinded to the authors, not submissions. I've been reviewing papers for medical journals for roughly the past 35 years. I think there was a single instance when an opinion piece was sent to me for an urgent review. The rest of the hundreds of papers I never had a clue about. In one instance, I favorably reviewed a paper submitted by one of my former trainees. I had no clue.

"...the public has been taught that scientific insight occurs when old white guys with facial hair get hit on the head with an apple or go running out of bathtubs shouting “Eureka!” "

That's indeed how the public sees things, mainly because it's rare as hen's teeth for the average schlub to have an original thought in his or her entire lifetime. But that's not how things usually work. Much more often, what's said is more along the lines of "hmmm...that's funny."

Overall, while I understand the authors' writing of the paper, the very fact that the paper n needed to be written is a darkly ominous sign of the times. The notion that merit somehow wants to be defended means that we are either in or are about to occupy another sleep of reason. That has exactly never been a god thing.

About the only reason I can think of to defend the obvious--like that merit is a good thing, kinda like the tautology that good things are good things--is to expose ridiculous illusions as just that.

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Anna Krylov's avatar

The non-paywalled version of our WSJ op-ed is available here:

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/06/02/our-wall-street-journal-op-ed-free-at-last/

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