JLT
Posts: 740
Joined: Jan. 2008
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This week in evolution made a nice find.
| Quote | The advocates of "intelligent design" claim there is enough scientific evidence for their theory that it should be taught in science classes. In support of this claim, they list a grand total of nine articles published in peer-reviewed journals over the entire history of intelligent design. This is fewer papers than evolutionary biologists publish every week, but every new field needs to start somewhere, I guess. The most-recent paper was published in 2006, however, which makes intelligent design look a bit moribund. Now it turns out that peer-review at the journal that published that paper, Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, is suspect.
Nature reports that the editor, who apparently uses the journal mainly to publish his own papers and those that cite him,
"is not, as he claims on his website, a distinguished fellow of the Institute of Physics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, says Walter Greiner, a former director of the institute. Greiner also says El Naschie has ignored his requests to remove his name from the list of members of the journal's honorary editorial board." |
"Suspect" is, of course, quite an understatement. The editor in chief of CS&F, El Naschie, used this Journal to publish his own articles.
| Quote | El Naschie is editor in chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. This journal is published by Elsevier, one of the biggest players in the science publishing business.
But here’s where things get interesting: this journal also lists 322 papers with El Naschie as an author! |
The n-Category Café, John Baez
The Nature article was triggered by El Naschie's "retirement" from his post as editor.
| Quote | According to the Elsevier spokesperson, El Naschie is retiring to spend more time with his sockpuppets.
The last sentence up there was just a joke, okay? Just a joke! Whenever some guy gets booted out of a job, it seems a ‘spokesman’ says he wants to ‘spend more time with his family’. But El Naschie prefers to take over blogs with crowds of imaginary commenters who trumpet the virtues of his theories or — lately, at a Telegraph article about Garrett Lisi — attack John Baez, the internet blog thug. If he stops editing Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, he’ll have even more time for this.
Here’s what the Elsevier spokesperson actually said: “as a former editor El Naschie will no longer be involved in editorial decision making for the journal”. |
John Baez (some quotes from the Nature article at this link)
That Elsevier allowed someone like El Naschie to be an editor of a Journal and selled his crankery to libraries as part of the Elsevier journal bundle is depressing.
| Quote | | And these aren’t just ordinary papers. Just this month, El Naschie published a paper in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals called Fuzzy multi-instanton knots in the fabric of spacetime and Dirac’s vacuum fluctuation. In this paper, he finds an “incredible correlation” between particle physics and the results of “ingeniously simple” experiments with knotted lengths of rope! |
Isn't that the perfect journal for an ID article?
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"Random mutations, if they are truly random, will affect, and potentially damage, any aspect of the organism, [...]
Thus, a realistic [computer] simulation [of evolution] would allow the program, OS, and hardware to be affected in a random fashion." GilDodgen, Frilly shirt owner
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