Retraction Watch: University press removes book about intelligent design for misquoting ID proponent

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An interesting (to me) case study in non-fiction book publishing, that touches questions about peer review and about retraction vs. correction. Excellent article at Retraction Watch (RW). My comments and questions below.

My main question is about whether and how the book was peer reviewed. The publisher claims that it “conducts peer review for all its academic books” through two rounds: one at the proposal stage and then “a second round of peer review of the full manuscript before publication.” I don’t doubt that the book was reviewed but I am genuinely baffled about how the error was missed.

Because, in my opinion, it’s a big error. The RW article explains what seems to have happened: the author misread text from Judge Jones’ Dover ruling, then wrote a description of Behe’s testimony that is false. The RW article quotes one of the DI people saying “the quote did not sound like Dr. Behe” and quotes Behe saying that the misreading “translated into an entirely fictional courtroom drama in his book.” I agree with both of those statements. I’m not a historian, not a lawyer, and not a person with even moderate interest in the history of ID falsehood and propaganda. I’ve never read the Jones opinion and wouldn’t have read the NYU Press book. But I used to read Behe and wrote extensively about his silly and shoddy writing* and so, to me, the misattributed quote absolutely does not sound like Behe. As a peer reviewer especially, I would have flagged this, red.

Now again, I will emphasize that I don’t travel in circles that know social science publishing, but my personal feeling is that this is bigger than a mere factual error, even a big factual error, because the fake quote is not just about history, or about what a person said, but is about what a person believes. I suspect that this is one reason why the publisher immediately yanked the book and will destroy existing copies. (I know there might also be legal threats involved but I’m not addressing that.)

Because the claim attributed to Behe is (IMO) so significant, it warranted particular scrutiny and review. Both the author and (apparently) the reviewers failed to do this. Moreover, that a scholar in a different field (me, in biology) immediately recognized the quote as problematic suggests, to me, that neither the author nor the reviewers were well informed about Dover or about Behe. Because the book is about the history of the ID movement, this seems a significant scholarly oversight.

Which leads me to a question that would arise if this were a journal article: shall we pursue correction, or retraction? I haven’t done the level of analysis needed to suggest an answer, and I have no interest in doing so, but for what it’s worth: the answer to me is unclear. This alone signals my deep concern about the error in the book, because in scientific journal publishing, the move from correction to retraction is a big one.

I wrote on this topic here on the forum several years ago, in my role as Editor-in-Chief at Cell Reports:

The main criterion is centrality of the error to the argument in the paper, which is related to “severity” I guess. Other criteria include more subjective judgments about overall trustworthiness of the work, and let’s be open here: errors that suggest negligence or incompetence can and should be judged differently from what we should call honest mistakes. There are no checklists or rubrics by which these judgments are made, but there are guidelines established with great care by COPE; when I face situations like this, I confer with colleagues and sometimes convene a committee of other editors to consider and judge the response to a paper containing errors.

I hope you can see why I am unsure whether correction is the right process. This is simply not a “minor error.”

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*Speaking of effective peer review, Behe’s The Edge of Evolution was almost certainly not reviewed by anyone with any expertise in genetics. I suspect it wasn’t peer reviewed at all.

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David Klinghoffer in the comments.

@Puck_Mendelssohn might be able to add a legal opinion?

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More emphasis added.

The relevant part of Behe’s testimony starts about here.,
and in the cross examination.

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Thanks for posting that; I didn’t look it up but to me this makes the book author look really bad. I can see that Jones’ opinion appears to assert knowledge that Behe claims those things. But I can’t see, or understand, how a credible scholar would then turn that into a verbatim quote, under oath from the stand. It’s indefensible, and it just doesn’t matter that Behe is himself a font of falsehood and indefensible distortions of science and data.

I probably should resist writing this, but it’s Friday so: the author is apparently a C.S. Lewis fan, a reddish flag in retrospect.

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So, interesting case. Looking up the Plaintiff’s Exhibit 718, I find it’s Behe’s article “Reply to My Critics” from Biology and Philosophy, 2001. The page cite is to 705, where we find this:

What if the existence of God is in dispute or is denied? So far I have assumed the existence of God. But what if the existence of God is denied at the outset, or is in dispute? Is the plausibility of the argument to design affected? As a matter of my own experience the answer is clearly yes, the argument is less plausible to those for whom God’s existence is in question, and is much less plausible for those who deny God’s existence. People I speak with who already believe in God generally agree with the idea of design in biology (although there are certainly exceptions), those who are in doubt are interested in the argument but often are skeptical, and as a rule those who actively deny God’s existence are either very skeptical or wholly disbelieving (Apparently, the idea of a natural intelligent designer of terrestrial life is not
entertained by a large percentage of people).

That certainly supports the court’s statement:

Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God. (P-718 at 705) (emphasis added).

But, of course, it is not a quote from Behe and should never be represented as one. The author might well have quoted from Behe’s paper, at greater length, in order to make the same point, but representing the court’s summary as a quote was entirely wrong. I know very little about the particular ethical standards applicable to such things as corrections and retractions, so can neither add to nor dispute what @sfmatheson has said about that. But it does seem to me to be a rather serious error.

I can’t see how it can have happened unless the author of the book didn’t understand how sources were cited in the court’s ruling. Nothing in the ruling suggests this is a quote, and the citation to an exhibit, rather than to the transcript, suggests that there’s a document in the record (in this case, Behe’s paper) which one must consult in order to know exactly what Behe said.

Now, the legal question one might ask is: is this defamatory? It’s certainly false, so we have that prong satisfied, but I’m not at all sure it’s defamatory. The quoted portion of the book reads:

Ultimately, the most damning admission might have come from Behe’s mouth himself, when he confessed on the stand that the “plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God.” At root, Behe’s admission showed that there was something fundamentally nonempirical at the heart of ID, that it was based upon philosophical assumptions, on metaphysics, and on first principles. It therefore depended upon a prior commitment.

I have to think that while not correct, that tracks close enough to what Behe actually did say in his paper that the claim that he made this specific statement isn’t defamatory. The claim has to cast him into some false light or other, and here we are dealing with, at best, shades. I guess that the argument would be that in Behe’s original statement, when he speaks of “plausibility” he is using the word in its subjective sense – he is talking about how different people will view the plausibility of IDC and how their prior views will affect that. But the statement about what this statement “showed” is more about the objective underpinnings of IDC. Behe isn’t saying that IDC depends upon a prior commitment – he is saying that its inferences will be more readily accepted by some than by others depending on what their personal prior beliefs are. But I think that’s a rather slim distinction to put in front of a jury of people of average literacy who have never troubled themselves with any philosophy of science or with IDC versus biological reality.

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I note that it was Casey Luskin who was drawing attention to the situation.

His hypocrisy is apparently boundless.

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If all of the IDC literature which misrepresents the views of some scientist or other were withdrawn, I am not sure there’d be any left. Certainly nothing by Luskin.

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No, the second sentence doesn’t « track close enough to what Behe said in his paper », not at all. In fact, it affirms the exact opposite as can be seen from the passage below taken from Behe’s paper:

« The conclusion of intelligent design in biochemistry rests exclusively on empirical evidence — the structures and functions of the biochemical systems — plus principles of logic (for example, see Dembski’s (1998) The Design Inference and Ratzsch’s (2001) Nature, Design, and Science). No particular tenet of faith is involved. Therefore, I consider design to be a scientific explanation (whether ultimately correct or not) ».

It is a sad state of affairs that an author would attribute a certain view to an opponent that not only he never hold but in fact is diametrically opposed to his real view and that he would built an important argument of his book on such misrepresentation.

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The is no argument that were a false attribution made of a purported actual verbatim statement, that would be a serious misrepresentation.

I would argue, however, that Behe’s “real” view actually does boil down to God being the designer. What are the alternatives? Time travelers from the future? Andromedans with a fascination for bacteria? Denying intelligent design is correlated with divine agency is either unbelievably stunted thinking, or transparently the sort of mealy mouthed political posturing that should be found repugnant.

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Yes it does. These are his exact words quoted from the paper:

What if the existence of God is in dispute or is denied? So far I have assumed the existence of God. But what if the existence of God is denied at the outset, or is in dispute? Is the plausibility of the argument to design affected? As a matter of my own experience the answer is clearly yes, the argument is less plausible to those for whom God’s existence is in question, and is much less plausible for those who deny God’s existence.

You’re getting two things mixed up. In one aspect Behe considers whether an argument is plausible to a person and what might feed in to that. In another he describes what strictly features in his scientific argument. Not the same thing. What @Puck_Mendelssohn wrote is absolutely correct.

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Funny. What @RonSewell and @Rumraket have already said to you is of course accurate and I won’t go over that again. But let’s consider your statement:

I recall a situation where Douglas Axe grotesquely, comically misrepresented the views of evolutionary biologists:

“The current stance is that evolution was so successful that it perfected life to the point where modern forms no longer evolve, making the whole process even further removed from the category of observable phenomena.”

You defended that statement by Axe for a long, long time before giving up. But it, of course, violates your above-stated ethical rule for authors, so I’m not sure why.

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Although the big bang inference rests entirely on empirical evidence, it nonetheless has theological ramifications. The same is true with the design inference. What’s the problem?

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The two are reverse situations. The big bang makes (in your opinion) God more plausible. But the point here is that God makes ID more plausible.

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That isn’t a problem in and of itself.

It’s when ID proponents deny the religious underpinnings and motivations of the ID movement in order to get creationism taught in science class (ultimately for political and cultural reasons), and lie about it to schoolboards, the public, and the courts where it becomes a problem.

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The parameters of nature observed in the emergent universe are necessary and sufficient for the developement of life. Design is an unjustified inference from insufficiency, which in turn is not empirical, but rather a God of the gaps argument from a current or purported lack of understanding.