For instance:

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

–James Delingpole, UK Telegraph

It struck me when I first read this section of the article that this is the exact thing that the intelligent design camp has been saying for years now. Michael Behe even documented his peer-review nightmare here. Intelligent design scientists have been systematically shut out of the peer-review process by being disallowed from the big journals, such as Nature, for years. Michael Behe isn’t the only one. If you haven’t heard of the whole “Sternberg” affair, go and check it out here. The idea that the peer-review system is some type of open process is just a total myth. Robert Higgs wrote about this back in 2007 for Nature:

Journalists, politicians and advocacy groups refer to “peer-reviewed research” and “scientific consensus” as the authoritative last words on controversial matters involving the natural sciences, from climate change to stem-cell research and genetically engineered foods. But many people have an unrealistic view of how the scientific community actually works.

The peer-review process is not, contrary to popular belief, a nearly flawless system of Olympian scrutiny. Any editor of a peer-reviewed journal who desires to reject or accept a submission can easily do so by choosing appropriate referees.

Unfortunately, personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion and irresponsibility are as much part of the scientific world as any other. Peer review cannot ensure that research is correct in its procedures and conclusions. A part of the work in every discipline—from the physical sciences to economics—consists of correcting previous mistakes.
At any given time, “scientific consensus” may exist about various matters. Over time, however, new interpretations, tests or observations may demolish that consensus. For instance, in the mid-1970s, an apparent scientific consensus existed that our planet was about to enter another Ice Age. Drastic proposals, such as exploding hydrogen bombs over polar icecaps to melt them. and damming the Bering Strait to prevent icy waters from entering the Pacific, were put forth by reputable scientists and seriously considered by the US government.

The truth is that scientific research at the upper echelons occurs within a fairly small world. Leading researchers attend the same conferences, belong to the same societies, review one another’s work for funding organizations, and so forth. If you do not belong to this tight fraternity, it becomes extremely difficult to gain a hearing for your work, to publish in a “top” journal, to acquire a government grant, to receive an invitation to participate in a scientific conference, or even to place your grad students in decent positions.

“Scientific consensus” often emerges because the members of this exclusive club, and those who support them, have too much invested in the reigning ideas to let go. In this context, it behooves bright young scientists not to rock the boat by challenging anything fundamental or dear to the hearts of those who constitute review committees of funders or journals. The terms “peer review” and “scientific consensus” often serve to suggest a process of disinterested neutrality and saintly pursuit of truth. Like every other human endeavour, however, science is conducted by people with the full range of human emotions and motives.

Good rules of thumb for the non-scientist might be the following: government-funded research that is used to justify that government’s policy should be suspect, whether or not it’s peer-reviewed; and the research of scientists who appear at press conferences in the company of politicians or activists whose agendas they are there to support should be suspect, whether or not the work upholds the consensus opinion.

–Bob Higgs, The Beacon

While I think that it’s great that global warming is in it’s death throws, I think the bigger lesson here is that whenever we hear the words “scientific consensus” it should immediately trigger our skeptic reflex. Science is an ongoing process of revolution and paradigm shift. It always has been. Today’s solid theory is tommorrows waste basket liner. Consensus in world of science is worth about as much as it is in the economics profession. That is to say, not much.

First, you must make up a random date and then make a big claim that you don’t intend to substantiate:

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.

Then, you clear the playing field so that you don’t have to actually provide hard evidence for any of the stories you are about to make up:

The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin’s time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today’s apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree.

…the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.

“This find is far more important than Lucy,” said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. “It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn’t look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between.”

The neo-darwinians have been trying to do this for years now. Establish the idea that there actually was no transitional form between apes and man. They realize how absurdly weak the fossil record is and that it’s never going to get any better for them. So instead, they change their story. Now, there isn’t any “missing link” they need to find. Instead, there is only a mythical “common ancestor” that they don’t have to find. Convenient, no?

Now, let’s bring in some radiometric dating nonsense:

The Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were discovered in Ethiopia’s harsh Afar desert at a site called Aramis in the Middle Awash region, just 46 miles (74 kilometers) from where Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974. Radiometric dating of two layers of volcanic ash that tightly sandwiched the fossil deposits revealed that Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago.

This is simply impossible. I’m sorry, but the flaw here is in misunderstanding the magnitude of what “millions” of years really means. Look, it takes teams of researchers sometimes decades to reconstruct and understand events from just a few hundred years ago. Why, do these people think they can possibly know who or what lived 4 MILLION years ago. Just stop and think about that for a minute. A million years. I cannot believe that we have instruments capable of accurately measuring in millions of years. I’m just not buying it. It’s naive.

And, here’s where we get into the typical Lucy BS. Skeletal amalgamations:

While important, however, none of those earlier fossils are nearly as revealing as the newly announced remains, which in addition to Ardi’s partial skeleton include bones representing at least 36 other individuals.

The way this works is that you take various bones from all sorts of critters and you just put them all in an arrangement that looks as much like a hominid as possible. This “skeleton” contains bones from 36 different creatures.

Now, with all of the preliminaries out of the way, we can move on to the meaty stuff. The storytelling. This is how modern hollywood-like science is done. You clear the field, throw out a bunch of claims, and then get on with spinning a good yarn that you couldn’t possibly really know happened:

The biggest surprise about Ardipithecus’s biology is its bizarre means of moving about.

All previously known hominids—members of our ancestral lineage—walked upright on two legs, like us. But Ardi’s feet, pelvis, legs, and hands suggest she was a biped on the ground but a quadruped when moving about in the trees.

Combined with modifications to the other toes, the bone would have helped Ardi walk bipedally on the ground, though less efficiently than later hominids like Lucy. The bone was lost in the lineages of chimps and gorillas.

Modern chimps and gorillas have evolved limb anatomy specialized to climbing vertically up tree trunks, hanging and swinging from branches, and knuckle-walking on the ground.

“What Ardi tells us is there was this vast intermediate stage in our evolution that nobody knew about,” said Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University in Ohio, who analyzed Ardi’s bones below the neck. “It changes everything.”

But it doesn’t stop there. No, he has to go full-silliness with a line like this:

Lovejoy sees these changes as part of an epochal shift in social behavior: Instead of fighting for access to females, a male Ardipithecus would supply a “targeted female” and her offspring with gathered foods and gain her sexual loyalty in return.

To keep up his end of the deal, a male needed to have his hands free to carry home the food. Bipedalism may have been a poor way for Ardipithecus to get around, but through its contribution to the “sex for food” contract, it would have been an excellent way to bear more offspring. And in evolution, of course, more offspring is the name of the game.

This is typical neo-darwinian story telling pure and simple. They do provide pictures though.

From this:

They got this:

Complete and utter silliness.

The claim is that this lemur monkey fossil is “the missing link in human evolution.” That’s the claim, and that’s what should be evaluated. It doesn’t matter if it’s a really cool fossil, or if it’s “almost complete”, or any of that. What matters is whether or not it is clearly and distinctly a transitional form between ape and man, as the headlines are blazing it. What you will see, rather, is just a mega-hyped version of the usual stuff. I’ll show you here how to read one of these articles properly. I’ve read so many missing-link articles over the years that I have it down to an art form. I could analyze one and make a sandwich at the same time. Let’s look at the article [my comments in brackets]:

So, there we have it. An entire article about the missing link discovery with only 3 short paragraphs about why it’s actually the missing link. And those paragraphs are just your usual Darwinian fairy tale story turned into science. And looking at the stupid marketing website it becomes really obvious what this is all about and why David Attenborough is so involved:

David over at Crev has a good writeup on it today as well. What a load.

I will not give you a story synopsis. You can read it here if you want. I’m more interested in the ideas. The book can be best described as a novelized Cristopher Hitchens lecture. Take everything you know about the neo-atheist movement’s talking points and you will find them romanticized in this book. It’s so bad (for lack of a better term) that the book was hard to listen to in spots. It’s not just that “religion”(read, Christianity) is worthless or irrelevant, it’s that it’s evil and should be eradicated. That’s the tone throughout the entire work. That’s what makes it Hitchens-esque. So just what is so poorly handled in the book? Let me give you the high points.

Firstly, the idea that the big-bang is totally incompatible with creation theory permeates the book. This is something that has troubled me for quite a while now. There is a concerted effort on the part of the physics elite to baptize the big-bang back into the fold of atheism. And to a large degree, they are being successful at it. But the history of the big bang is wrought with hostility from the atheist camp. The big-bang/expanding universe idea was, from it’s inception, viewed as a threat to the uniformitarian view of natural science. Just look at what the big bang is. It says, in effect, that the universe exploded into existence from nothing at a fixed point of time in history. This fixed point of space-time is known commonly as a “singularity”. The threat to natural science was always that “something from nothing” is inexplainable apart from an outside creative force(or God). Take these references from Wikipedia:

Much time and effort was spent on the part of naturalists to disprove the big bang, and consequently, the expanding universe. But now that it’s truth is virtually undeniable, it’s time for physics to bring it into the fold and sweep the sordid past under the rug. And Preston does his best to run with that notion in Blasphemy. One of the characters actually said that Stephen Hawking had proved, through his equations, how the universe could spring into being from nothing. This is either wishful thinking on Preston’s part, or intentional mis-information. Hawking has done nothing of the sort. Now, I’m no physicist, but I do know how to read, and I can understand a well-explained argument. Read Hawking’s words for yourself:

Hawking’s theories of the universe appearing without cause out of nothingness depend on using what he calls “imaginary time”. He freely admits that his model doesn’t obtain if calculated with real time values. But then again, that doesn’t concern him. He doesn’t know what reality is anyway, according to his quote. So, it seems to me, at best, we can say that Hawking’s theory (known generally as a Quantum Gravity Model) is a mathematical exercise. Claiming that it proves the universe could come out of nothingness is going way, way out on a limb. It’s just not justified in any way. If Hawking’s model proves the possibility of ex nihilo creation without a creator, then Rudyard Kipling’s model proves how the leopard got it’s spots.

This is the first exception I take with the book. I’ll explore others in later posts.

The debate over “Lucy” has always been about whether or not it was just a mottled together ape skeleton, or some type of early hominid. This new find so far does almost nothing to change that debate. From the waist down, only a few fragments were found, so you can’t really say what they indicate. The upper body, on the other hand, strongly indicates ape-ness:

This line blows me away though:

Creationists have held for years that the fossil record clearly indicates a world-wide cataclysmic flood event. Call it Noah’s flood if you like. Every ancient culture has a world-wide flood myth, not just Christians and Jews, but for some reason nobody believes there was a world-wide flood. Many dinosaur sites around the world show signs of rapid flood burial. We have sedimentary fossils of fish schools 1000’s of feet up in the Sierra mountains, yet there was no flood?

More good stuff about this find can be found here.