Teleology and peer review: A thought experiment

[Krauze]

@sfmatheson

The conversation I thought we were having is about whether it is realistic to picture a scenario like the one you discussed, as though there are pervasive undercurrents of assumed “bad design” in the scientific literature.

I maintain that it’s a realistic scenario. Not because I think scientists are sitting around all day poo-pooing the quality of life’s designs, but because there are isolated areas in which discussions of “bad design” make up a good chunk of the scientific literature. The optimality of the standard genetic code is one such area, where it used to be that “a comprehensive search of possible code structures suggests that far better alternatives are possible (Wong 1980; DiGiulio 1989, 1994; Goldman 1993)”, as Freeland et al. (2000) write, criticizing this view. In fact, had my thought experiment taken place in the 1990’s, the standard genetic code could very well have been “Structure X”.

However, I won’t belabor this point, as the point of a thought experiment isn’t to mimic reality one-to-one, but to explore the consequences of one’s thinking in an idealized situation. After all, how unrealistic is the trolley problem in supposing that so many people will be tied to railway tracks at the same time?

@sfmatheson

My point about the Panglossian Paradigm, which you seem to have ignored, is that some scientists (including me), are critical of the very opposite of what your scenario envisions. Microbiology is an area where this is likely to be more pronounced than, say, in animal development, for reasons we can discuss if you are interested. The critique is made most famously and eloquently by Lewontin and Gould, but has been reiterated in somewhat different and more intense terms by Michael Lynch. The ongoing debate pits “adaptationists” against those who think that there can be, at least in some cases, too much emphasis on the prowess of selection in ascending fitness peaks.

I ignored it because I saw it as tangential to my thought experiment. But I’m always interested in talking about the adaptationism vs. structuralism debate and the role played by developmental constraints, so don’t take my ignoring your earlier point as anything other than trying to keep the thread on topic.

References

Freeland S.J., Knight R.D., Landweber L.F., & Hurst L.D., 2000, “Early Fixation of an Optimal Genetic Code”, Molecular Biology and Evolution 17(4):511-518

[sfmatheson]

@Krauze

I maintain that it’s a realistic scenario.

The literature shows it be rare, but I think the more interesting problem with your scenario is that it makes questions of reviewer/editor bias fade into the background behind competing assertions about the relevance or importance of claims/assumptions of “bad design” (they’re negligible at best) and confounding implications that design theorists think that showing “bad” versus “good” design is even relevant to a design argument or hypothesis. (It’s not.) I would suggest that the discussion above shows that few people stayed on the topic, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Would/should editors (like me) attend to claims of supernatural guidance or “design” or similar nonsense? We can, after all, intervene early in the process to save an author from damaging their paper by polluting it with silliness, and such silliness can take various forms (outlandish claims of therapeutic potential are by far the most common glitches we think about in my sector of the profession). We can also overrule reviewers who seem biased or distracted by side issues. It would have been interesting to discuss this, especially since ID defenders, like most laypeople, seem to have almost no understanding of the process of peer review and publication. Oh well.