Turncoat
Posts: 129
Joined: Dec. 2007
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| Quote (carlsonjok @ Oct. 06 2009,15:40) | | Quote (Turncoat @ Oct. 05 2009,18:56) | | Quote (sledgehammer @ Oct. 05 2009,18:06) | | Quote (Turncoat @ Oct. 05 2009,15:57) | The latest at Bounded Science:
| Quote | Resolving a moral dilemma
I made a promise to Bob Marks that I would not divulge my correspondence with him regarding drafts of the paper that IEEE SMC-A published last month. But I did not know that he and Dembski would resort to trickery to get the paper published, and, after considerable agonizing, I've decided that the better course is to break my word. |
False attribution of partitioned search to Dawkins is the not the full extent of the academic dishonesty in the article. |
This is the first I've heard of sneaky tactics or trickery in the path to publication. Any details you can share? Give us dirty laundry! We like dirty laundry. |
Another blog entry is on the way. Omitting the names of the two evolutionary algorithms, as well as neglecting to cite the relevant literature, was a trick to keep the editors and reviewers from scrutinizing the redundant and/or worthless analysis Dembski and Marks provided. If there had been explicit mention of evolutionary algorithms, the editor-in-chief might have handed the paper off to a different associate editor, and the associate editor might have lined up better-informed reviewers. |
Let me play the Devil's (heh!) Advocate here. You are assuming that D&M resorted to trickery to get their paper published. I will grant that it is a safe assumption given those two's history (e.g. trying to sneak Dembski into the EIL ,and by extension back into Baylor, as a post-doc.) However, you might ask yourself if the omissions you see as proof of academic dishonesty could, when divorced from the backstory, also be interpreted as academic sloppiness? If there is latitude for someone at IEEE, who is not familiar with the evolution culture war like we are, to come to a different conclusion, then you might tread carefully about ascribing motive.
I am not saying that they weren't trying to pull a fast one and I am not saying you should not call them out for academic dishonesty. But, just be aware that your reputation may be as much on the line as theirs.
Additionally, from my perspective*, the greatest indictment against Dembski and Marks is their willful misrepresentation of WEASEL as a partitioned search. There is a long, documented history of them being told otherwise. You specifically told Marks that it wasn't. And Wes Elsberry had told the same to Dembski 9 years ago.
* Granted, I am not an expert in these technical subjects. Indeed, I don't even rise to the level of amateur. But, I can understand the implications of their continued misrepresentation of WEASEL without having it stated specifically. |
See what Shallit had to say about acknowledging priority at Recursivity. He seems to agree that it's a pretty big deal to leave out mention of prior work you know about.
Dembski and Marks certainly repeat published analysis in the case of the (1+1)-EA [the one with "elitism"]. Prior results make the approximation they derive for the (1,2)-EA essentially worthless. DiEb has done Markov modeling of the Weasel program as a (1,n)-EA [what most of us think it is, whether we know the nomenclature or not] to generate the wonderful plots at his blog. This is what Dembski and Marks evidently were unable to do for even the (1,n)-EA searching for a target sentence over a 2-character alphabet, with n restricted to 2. In other words, Dembski and Marks have little to show in comparison to what DiEb put out on his blog.
Hope that made sense. I've got to rush off to keep a date with my bicycle.
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I never give them hell. I just tell the truth about them, and they think it's hell. — Harry S Truman
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