Use of the Scientific Literature (osmium & irw)

[osmium]

Originally Posted by Baltimoron

Osmium, you're not seriously arguing that Behe's oeuvre is just on the level of one of these bad papers that muck up the total volume of scientific papers, are you? I think even the most earnest student's effort would exceed the value of Behe's hackery by orders of magnitude.

They're not student papers, but regular papers. Often paper-writing duties are shared between a student-advisor pair, so you could consider most papers as student papers on some level. (In the journal reading club, they were *selected* by students.)

They don't muck up the literature, because they are the foundation of it. Thousands of people working, out of which good ideas will nucleate. But you should view every effort with scepticism. Behe is BS (and doesn't have much of an oeuvre), but the mechanism that weeds through the "sloppy-bad" will work just as well on the "bad-bad." Having your meme die out, the death of your idea, happens when you get ignored.

Originally Posted by Baltimoron

And, was Bob Wright any less slippery during his reading, or did the audience challenge him like John Horgan?

Bob was great, and Bruce Feiler and he sparred on a few things, like the overall importance of Philo in history.