The Argument Clinic

I asked , my editor whether I addressed your guys main objections and she and her team informed me that I was successful in addressing the alleged fatal objections in the article. Here it is…

Dear author,

I have edited your manuscript for language and grammar. I believe you have addressed the objections adequately. However, there are still a few areas that need further clarification. There are also some good arguments in the appendices that could be incorporated into the main text if you feel they are important enough. Please see my notes for more details. Overall, the manuscript is much more clear and detailed than in previous rounds of editing, and is coming together very nicely. It appears that you are nearing submission readiness; if you require help with journal formatting or cover letter creation, please contact us and we will be happy to help.

So it looks like both of you are just wrong or just inherently bias. :sleepy:

I think that a better comparison would be with a nonpredatory journal response.

According to their website, a vast majority of researchers would disagree:

“Over 97% of researchers believe that pre-submission peer review service improved the quality of their last published paper by identifying scientific errors and missing and inaccurate references.”

I guess you guys are part of that 3%:smile:

I wonder how many similar crank articlesthat editorial service receives, and whether they ever question the ethics of taking the authors’ money and giving them false hope.

Another example of your complete inability to understand the criticism you are receiving. No one here has doubted that editorial assistance improves the writing quality of an article.

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Predictably, you completely missed the point.

No it is the other way around. As I told guys on here, the type of service I purchased included peer-review along with editing services:

Scientific Review Report

TARGET TOP RATED JOURNALS WITH THE RIGHT EXPERTISE

A Scientific Review Report is created by peer reviewers for top journals like Nature, premium editors with 20+ years of experience, and our managing editors. This team of 3 experts shares critical feedback on improvements to your paper based on the scope of your target journal. Their feedback shortens the time a journal takes to evaluate your paper and increases your chances of acceptance in the high-impact journals.
Scientific Editing Services: Top Journal Editing by Scientific Publication Experts | Editage

No, I think it is the other way around.

I have made it very clear here that I was not planning on publishing this article directly. Instead, my plan was to make sure this paper has all the necessary elements in it to be a viable template for more qualified researchers to further develop this theory and model.

Right now, this paper is still considered a rough draft and will always be one until more competent Christian researchers take ownership of the content of this paper and make it robust and ready to submit to a theology, philosophy, or scientific journal themselves. They would be able to make the most out of it.

When that day comes, I will continue to improve on it , if need be, until the theory is a fully viable template for researchers to take it the next level.

So ,of course, it is still not perfect, but there are no major flaws nor is it lacking anything that would make it less than a scientific theory anymore.

It says the report is “created by peer reviewers”.

That does not mean it constitutes peer review.

If a professional prostitute agrees to mow my lawn for a fee, that does not mean we have had sex.

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They never said this service constituted actual scientific peer-review, but it is a close simulation of it:

Pre-Submission Peer Review Services: Eliminate major reasons for manuscript rejection | Editage

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And I almost came when that hooker mowed my lawn.

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Isn’t that a country-and-western song?

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Get the lines just right, eh?

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No, this is what I meant when I said that:

Do you guarantee publication?

Publication depends largely on the quality of your research and is a subjective decision that the journal editor takes based on several factors. Therefore, we cannot guarantee publication. However, by helping you understand and follow publication protocols and by offering Premium Editing and Pre-submission Peer Review services*, we help you increase your chances of publication.*Pre-submission Peer Review is only available with the Platinum pack or a Custom pack where you opt for this component.

The highlighted part is what makes it different than actual peer-review. My paper is not constructed for submission to a specific journal.

That’s because my paper is not supposed to be constructed as an original research article.

Instead, it is supposed to be a perspective article type. Read link for more:

https://jle.hse.ru/pop

I think you guys are missing the point here.

I have made it very clear that I am not planning on publishing this article directly. Instead, my plan was to make sure this paper has all the necessary elements in it to be a viable template for more qualified researchers to further develop this theory and model.

Right now, this paper is still considered a rough draft and will always be one until more competent Christian researchers take ownership of the content of this paper and make it robust and ready to submit to a theology, philosophy, or scientific journal themselves. They would be able to make the most out of it.

When that day comes, I will continue to improve on it , if need be, until the theory is a fully viable template for researchers to take it the next level.

So ,of course, it is still not perfect, but there are no major flaws nor is it lacking practical elements that would make it less than a scientific theory anymore.

A rather vague, half-hearted and disengaged endorsement, given that he admits that he hasn’t even read “anywhere close” to all of whichever of the myriad versions of it he was referring to, and does not come even close to discussing its merits.

If Sam and Bill, both of whom appear to have a fairly meager scientific background (contrast with the far stronger scientific backgrounds of @Mercer and @John_Harshman, who have both been more critical), and neither of whom seem to have engaged with your ‘theory’ to any great degree, are the best that you can come up with in terms of support for your ‘theory’, then I would suggest that this does next-to-nothing to counterbalance the negative opinions you have received.

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Have any of these “more qualified researchers” (a set that would leave out Bill and Sam) expressed a positive impression of your project, let alone suggested that it comes anywhere close to having “he necessary elements in it to be a viable template”, let alone expressed any interest “to further develop this theory and model”?

I would suggest rather that these “more qualified researchers” have told you that your ‘theory’ is incoherent and poorly substantiated, and thus a poor foundation for any further enterprise.

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If it’s a theory, it needs results. If you’re upset that I’m expecting your work to be what you say it is, that’s a you problem.

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Have you considered submitting to a theological journal? Why go to all the trouble to satisfy scientific review when there are journals without any scientific requirements?
Here’s one, and they published Demski.
https://www.pdcnet.org/pc/Submission-Guidelines

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That’s because they prefer to end the debate on their terms and prefer Joshua’s model and approach by defualt. Joshua’s approach allows them to hold on to their unsupported pet theory.

Yes. Of course:

Dear author,

I have edited your manuscript for language and grammar. I believe you have addressed the objections adequately. However, there are still a few areas that need further clarification. There are also some good arguments in the appendices that could be incorporated into the main text if you feel they are important enough. Please see my notes for more details. Overall, the manuscript is much more clear and detailed than in previous rounds of editing, and is coming together very nicely. It appears that you are nearing submission readiness; if you require help with journal formatting or cover letter creation, please contact us and we will be happy to help.

A scientific theory is a large overarching explanation that unites lots of fields and explains lots of different kinds of observations. What springs forth from there are hypothesizes that are narrow and we can test it.

Richard Owen’s universal common design/archetype from a Divine mind is that overarching theory. My particular common design model is a hypothesizes that flows out of that overarching theory of common design. The same goes with the Orch-OR theory of consciousness.

I hope this clears things up.

Oh yeah. I have tried on numerous occasions to submit it to philosophical or theological journals. However, it got rejected every single time because of the many scientific arguments that were present in the paper. Here is an example of what I mean:

Without passing judgment on the merits of your paper, I’m afraid I must pass on it for Perspectives on Science. It’s a contribution to the evolution/design debate, to theoretical evolutionary biology and, to a lesser extent, to the philosophy of science—but the Perspectives mission statement commits us to interdisciplinary work on the intersection of history, philosophy, and sociology of science. All articles are expected to have significant grounding in at least two out of these three disciplines (see the “Purpose and Scope” statement on our website for more).

I sympathize regarding your unfortunate experience with the peer-review service. In my experience, such services are rarely if ever able to deliver on the promises they make. There are reasons for this. Scholarly peer review is a chore professional scholars perform, pro bono, as a service to the scholarly community. Many of them shirk this duty outright, and those who are willing to do it, and able to do a good job of it, are in short supply, and thus frequently overtaxed. It follows that such people are unwilling to free-lance with commercial services; their priorities lie elsewhere. The commercial services are left with third- or fourth-tier “experts” as their consultants. You’ve observed the result for yourself. Your scholarly aspirations would be better served by a small (preferably local, but online works too) peer group of fellow scholars who meet to critique each others’ work.

I highlighted this part to illustrate why I have decided to spend the majority of my time on this forum. Without this forum, I would not have been able to get this far with my model.

If I did decide to submit it to a journal again, it would be one that allowed for perspective article types because it is the best fit compared to all other article types.

No. A scientific theory starts as a hypothesis. Scientific hypotheses start as explanations, but they still need to make empirical predictions–yours doesn’t.

A hypothesis only begins to be considered to be a theory after it has withstood many rigorous empirical tests. Like evolutionary theory.

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Yes, that can be said for Richard Owen’s universal common design/archetype from a Divine mind.

For instance, Charles Darwin himself famously complained in a letter to Asa Gray, “I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic insects] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.”

The same goes with so-called design flaws in nature. However, over the course of 30 years, it has been repeatedly found that what initially seemed to be a design flaw or evil design caused by an unguided process turned out not to be the case afterall with increasing understanding of the design.

Richard Owen’s theory also has a history of accurate predictions regarding gaps in the fossil record. For instance, the fossil record has revealed that the observed pattern of no evolutionary change punctuated by rapid biological innovations matches the patterns predicted [47] if a common design/archetype accounts for life’s history and diversity.

Lastly, he claimed humans were unique and did not emerge from ape ancestors. There has been numerous observations that have confirmed human expectionalism where the cognitive abilities of the human brain have not been observed to be present in animal brains nor did they work properly in animal brains through experimentation.

This is why Richard Owen’s explanation can be considered a scientific theory. In contrast, my particular common design model is a hypothesize that flows out of that overarching theory of common design. This leads me to address this…

That is not what you suggested in a different thread…

Every item in that list is subjective except one. It’s a pseudoscientific farce.

The only one that is empirical is:

Prediction: we should determine that most pseudogenes and ERV’s are functional.

(A) We would expect analogous traits to evolve separately between families and orders in response to similar needs.
Not empirical and not different from evolutionary theory.
(B) We expect to find functional ERV’s and pseudogenes between families and orders.
[/quote]

Not empirical and not different from evolutionary theory. Numbers and proportions might make it empirical.

Prediction: over 80% of families and orders evolved separately.

Almost, but only if you can define “species trees” empirically. Since it makes no sense, I doubt you can.

Prediction: The regulatory regions of core gene promoters between over 80% of families and orders are incongruent with species phylogenies (I.e., vertical inheritance).

Please explain how the parasitic Ichneumon wasps fit into that view. Then you can take on river blindness, malaria, and so on.

There is no such pattern. Nor does Owen’s theory predict such a pattern. Also, if you’re going to cite references, more than just a number would be necessary. But based on your history, I suspect that the reference doesn’t support the claim.

This is in conflict with both the fossil evidence and the genetic evidence. Why, apes even have a hippocampus major.

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