忘却からの帰還〜Intelligent Design

Life is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views....

Lifeは、新規かつ困難な学際問題を扱う新しい学術誌である。したがって、物議をかもしたり、通常科学の見方からはずれた論文が投稿されて、掲載されることがある。...

[ Editor who published Andrulis paper tries to explain how it happened (2012/02/03) ]

The "interdisciplinary" excuse is bogus. I am not a specialist in the fields discussed, but I could see immediately that Andrulis's paper, and Abel's paper as well, were "off" − to any critical, skeptical thinker their flaws are obvious. Are there any scientists in any field − general physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, for instance − who would read either of those papers and think maybe there's something to them? You'd have to be a fellow crackpot or somebody completely unqualified to evaluate any science papers to fail to see the problems in them.

「学際分野」などという言い訳は無意味だ。私はこの分野の専門家ではないが、Anrulisの論文やAbelの論文がダメでることは即座にわかるい、いかなる批判的・懐疑的な考えをする人々にとっても、誤りは明白に見て取れる。どの分野の科学者でも、物理・生物・化学・心理学でも、どっちの論文を読んでも、何か意味があるだろうか？　変人か科学論文をまったく評価できないのでない限り、これらの論文の問題を見落とすことはない。

Also, you don't need someone with great interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to screen out this kind of nonsense. I'm reminded of the comment I read on the Velikovsky affair: someone (it might have been Sagan) noted that the astronomers could see that Velikovsky's cosmic billiard game was bad physics, but gosh, his biblical scholarship sure was impressive; while the Bible scholars were all saying his mythology was all terrible literary scholarship, but golly, he sure seemed to know a lot of physics.

この手のナンセンスを排除するのに、偉大な学際知識を持つ者など必要ない。私はヴェリコフスキー問題についての誰かのコメントを思い出す（セーガンだったかな）。ヴェリコフスキーの聖書について学識が印象的であっても、天文学者はヴェリコフスキーの宇宙ビリヤードが悪い物理であることは見てとれる。ヴェリコフスキーは物理について多くを知っているように見えても、聖書学者にはヴェリコフスキーの神話研究がまったくのゴミであることはわかる。

[ PZ Myers: "Editor who published Andrulis paper tries to explain how it happened" (2012/02/03) ]