It is easy to forget, here in our echo chamber, that most of the world’s researchers care little about “intelligent design” creationism. When Dembski and Marks submit a paper like “The Search for a Search” to online journals founded and edited by Poles and Japanese, there is a good chance that the reviewers are unsuspecting of shenanigans.
Much of the online criticism of IDC could, with little modification, be packaged as rough drafts of scholarly papers, and uploaded to archives such as arXiv.org. What makes this worthwhile is that Google Scholar, and not just Google, indexes these archives. A Scholar hit with a title such as “Errors in ‘The Search for a Search’ of Dembski and Marks” stands a good chance of catching the attention of reviewers of future work by the authors. Of course, archiving a critique does not preclude linking to it from blogs.
Rob recently gave a response [PDF] to “The Search for a Search” that strikes me as a prime example of what should be uploaded to arXiv.org. (In any case, I recommend it to those of you who can deal with math.)
I intend to follow my own advice. Provided that the lead author does not object, I’ll soon archive a brief paper, and notify you of it.
I enjoyed Rob's paper, too - it should reach a wider audience!
ReplyDeleteDiEb also has a good response to "The Search for a Search" here, though it is in the form of a letter instead of a brief paper.
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