I’ve received an interesting comment within a posting here about “Irreducible complexity explained“. It deserves a bit of thought and a carefully considered response, so I thought I’d post my reply here, its too long to be just a comment reply, and may be of interest to others.
The commenter basically raises four points, so I propose to consider each in turn.
1) We have to take a lot on trust from academia. The assertion that peer review indicated acceptability and not necessarily accuracy muddies things.
Peer-reviewers simply consider if a submitted papers claim is supported by the data in it, ensure its appropriate for the journal, and that the study has used proper controls to account for other possible explanations. Its only one small part of the overall process.