Yes, if that is the reason, but not if their work is rejected merely if it is YEC.

I recently saw a paper get accepted by a biology journal, and then rejected because the editors found out the authors were associated with intelligent design. That is inappropriate in my opinion.

The ones I've heard about ("accepted by a biology journal, and then rejected because the editors found out") are usually due to subterfuge or some undermining of the system.

Eg, using terms that obfuscate the YEC aspects of the paper, which isn't obvious enough for the reviewers to understand what it actually means.

There are also journals which accept anything, with little or no review (eg, some conference papers) and societies which allow their members to publish anything, and use post-publication review to retract papers.

Or sometimes someone with YEC beliefs gets editorial control and start green-lighting YEC papers not on merit but because of those personal beliefs.

Can you point to the incident?

Do you think it was rejected merely because it was YEC? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a YEC claim?

Recent one I saw: https://retractionwatch.com/2020/10/07/elsevier-journal-disa...

(FWIW, this paper wasn't retracted, but that detail isn't that important. It's also an ID paper, not a YEC one; both are part of creationalism and the difference isn't important enough for the point of this discussion.)

The key questions are: Do you think it was controversial merely because it was on ID? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a ID claim?

It appears that paper falls solidly in my description of how such works get into print, eg, cherry-picking quotes:

1) added the keywords "intelligent design" after editorial review

2) "naive to the point of being silly"

3) "I can only speculate, but inattention to the details and unfamiliarity with the references might have played a role [in how the article made it into print]."

I don't follow why hiding references and names should matter, if that is even what was done. Shouldn't the content of the paper be paramount? It looks like a paper was accepted based on its own merits and then disowned when the editors discovered it may be associated with an unpopular viewpoint. I have no idea why that is acceptable in a professional venue.

To answer your question "Shouldn't the content of the paper be paramount?" directly, NO!

If the conclusions of the paper have already been demonstrated to be incorrect, but the authors both know those objections and leave out discussion of them, then it's a seriously flawed paper.

Reviewers and editors cannot catch all merit-less papers. The acceptance system is based on a system of trust, including trust that the authors have highlighted possible flaws in their argument. There's also the post-publication review process, including retractions.

Moreover, most reviewers will not have experience with creationist literature (because it's a pseudoscience with no predictive ability), so are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists.

For example, "design" could mean "the result of natural evolutionary processes", but to a creationist it might mean the design of a creator, that is, as short-hand for "intelligent design."

Had they used "intelligent design" at the start, it would have helped the reviewer understand the context. Leaving that out until after the review process ended makes me suspicious that this omission was deliberate.

To elaborate on my comment, if you've read the paper, they have a large section devoted to fine tuning, intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses, all with explicity references to the main authors, such as Dembski, and their works. I'm not really grasping how your comment is addressing the paper and the reason for the warning notice.

Here's an example of what I mean:

> William Dembski, who mainly belongs to the frequentist’s school in statistics, regards the fine-tuning argument as suggestive, as pointers to underlying design.

Dembski's "design" is specifically "intelligent design". The blurb for the book cited starts. 'How can we identify events due to intelligent causes'.

Is that the same type of design as the authors mean? Let's go back to the long discussion of what 'design' means:

> A design is a specification or plan for the construction of an object or system, or the result of that specification or plan in the form of a product. ... Humans have a powerful intuitive understanding of design that precedes modern science. Our common intuitions invariably begin with recognizing a pattern as a mark of design.

So, is DNA a 'specification or plan for the construction of an object'? For many proteins it certainly is. So, is DNA a design? According to this definition, yes!

But Dembski's argument is that there must an intelligent designer. While biologists often use phrases like "evolution designed" to describe the results of standard evolution.

Picking one paper from a Google Scholar search, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-71152-7_... says "Immunology is frequently the prisoner of its own semantics. Evolution designed an immune system equipped to recognize all foreign antigens, the structure of which it cannot know in advance." Or in a summary from https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/202/202ec148.short "In modern times, we turn up the thermostat if we’re cold, but evolution designed our bodies to acclimate to cold temperatures and maintain euthermia (normal body temperature) without the assistance of external climate control."

Neither claim an intelligent designer involved, so that "powerful intuitive understanding of design" must include designs that were not created by a designer, yes?

Which means that Dembski's use of the term 'design' is not shared by the general readership a biology journal, and omitting the qualifier intelligent design when talking about Dembski's work is a form of white-washing - just like I described when I wrote 'most reviewers ... are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists'.

You write 'they have a large section devoted to ... intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses'.

I see one paragraph which specifically calls out intelligent design. The next paragraph is on William Dembski. Is Dembski's work specifically ID? Then why wasn't Dembski's earlier work described that way?

I looked at (Olofsson, 2008). It says outright "In a way, the ideas in The Design Inference and No Free Lunch are examples of an exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences." And cites other publications describing problems in Dembski's work.

The third and last paragraph in this section claims that Dembski's work has been re-formulated as ASC, and implies that the re-formulation overcomes those criticisms.

So, has it? It's not hard to find criticisms of ASC: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/evo-info-4-non-conservation-o... and https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2019/12/Is-Algorithmic-Spec... , for examples, the latter arguing "the connection to evolution is lacking".

Given Dembski's earlier 'exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences' and the strength of the many previous criticisms, why are Thorvaldsen and Hössjer confident that ASC overcomes those criticisms? They don't say.

You'll be hard-pressed to find a reviewer diligent enough to go through all of the citations to check for this level of undue optimism.

You should probably read more of the article to get a better idea of what the authors are arguing. They are making a fine tuning argument like Barrow and Tipler. Barrow and Tipler wrote a whole book on the fine turning of cosmological constants, and it was well received. The whole article provides the theoretical background for fine tuning arguments, and the main evidence they rely on are the big name ID proponents: Dembski, Behe, Axe, Sanford. In fact, the article is absolutely chock full of references to peer reviewed ID articles. They call out ID by name multiple times, and explain its connection to their work, and state that the results imply intelligent agency. For example,

"Axe also elaborates on the massive improbabilities of anything like functional proteins arising by natural selection (Axe, 2016). The search space turns out to be too impossibly vast for blind selection to have even a slight chance of success. The contrasting view is innovations based on ingenuity, cleverness and intelligence."

I really don't see any sneakiness going on here.

Also, is it normal to respond to blog post criticisms in a journal article? Otherwise, I'm not sure why you think it is a problem the journal authors didn't respond to blog posts. I've not seen such a requirement before, and I've spent a fair amount of time in academia. On the other hand, from what I see, the authors do respond to published criticisms of ID theory, e.g. papers by Wilkins, Elsberry and Olofsson. So, at least regarding your concern they do not mention the criticisms of ID and provide responses, hopefully this should set you at ease.

Finally, the authors explain why they think ASC overcomes, or at least addresses the previous criticism of ID:

"However, it is hard to apply to many interesting biological applications or contexts, because a huge number of potential but unknown scenarios may exist, which makes it difficult to phrase a null hypothesis for a statistical test."

with the fact that ASC is measured in regards to a specific probability distribution:

"ACS incorporates both Shannon and Kolmogorov complexity measures, and it quantifies the degree to which an event is improbable and follows a pattern."

and this approach is further improved by a later result they mention by Montañez. At any rate, I recommend giving the article a careful read before coming to conclusions.

So, I still do not understand why it is within normal scholarly protocols to post a warning about the article. It is very forthright about its ID connection, in fact forming almost the entirety of the paper around ID arguments and authors, addresses criticisms, cautions about its own conclusions, and seems to be pretty mathematically rigorous and written by well credentialed authors.

I did give it a careful read, and dislike how you assume I did not.

As the rebuttal paper puts it, "neither fine-tuning nor intelligent design is required when sample spaces are viewed through the lens of evolutionary dynamics."

I agree. Where in their paper do they consider this standard criticism to ED, and point out that the criticism is un-founded?

Indeed, as they themselves point out (when talking about the creation of the universe, "A probabilistic argument presumes adequate knowledge of (the limits on) the space of possibility. It presupposes that current knowledge provides an accurate, unbiased statistical account of, or means of determining, what may or may not happen by chance." And we don't have that, so can't use this approach to determine if there was intelligent design.

Where has ASC been shown to be an effective of model for evolutionary processes? The relevant paper by Montañez says:

> Following Behe, let us say a system is irreducible if it contains at least three well-matched components that contribute necessarily to a core function, such that removal or mutilation of any of the components causes the system to cease functioning with respect to the core function.

That is a definition, which is good enough for a mathematical model. But does it model biology? No!

It's well-known that evolutionary systems may lead to such systems, therefore the existence of irreducible complexity in a given biological system does not mean evolution couldn't have happened, or that intelligent design must have occurred.

So how does ASC connect to the goals of this paper? Shrug. You're the one who read it carefully enough, yes?

As to "is it normal to respond to blog post criticisms in a journal article".

Why are you even asking that question? My pointing to a blog post was because it was easy to find. I am not an expert in pseudo-scientific research fields like ID or YEC, nor am I an expert in the counter-refutations of that research.

Are you saying that no such counter-arguments have been published in the scholarly literature? Or are you saying that you will ignore me unless I can point to specific literature?

I never would have heard of these ID arguments and authors had I not been following the blog of an evolutionary biologist for 15+ years who has a special interest in pointing out flaws in creationist arguments. Do you really think most biologists are trained to recognize ID authors, or understand when "design" is meant to only mean "intelligent design"?

Sorry for offending you. It is just incorrect to say only two paragraphs of the paper deal with ID. From my read through, almost the entire paper is reliant upon various ID literature and arguments, which is called out explicitly. It is not subtle in the slightest.

I get the paper's arguments are debated by biologists. But I still don't understand how this at all relates to the big disclaimer about the authors' connections and claiming because of these connections the paper is not suitable for publishing in the journal, which they have published after a peer review. Makes no sense to me, and I'm really not tracking your explanation.

> Do you really think most biologists are trained to recognize ID authors, or understand when "design" is meant to only mean "intelligent design"?

Why do biologists have to be trained to recognize ID authors? They don't have to be trained to recognize information theorists, or computer scientists, or any other hosts of independent disciplines that could be relevant to biology. And don't the authors clearly point out they are intending 'design' in the sense we attribute to humans, i.e. intelligent designers? Seems that way to me. Sorry, I am dense, I am really not understanding your point. It sounds to me like you want to imply some sort of deception on the part of the authors, but for all the reasons I've stated, this is entirely non obvious to me, and the journal's disclaimer still comes across as light censorship in the form of well poisoning, so I will have to disengage from this discussion. I wish you well.

It seems like you are responding to something other than I said.