# Creatorgate & Scientific Bias

#Creatorgate and the Sorry State of Science 

The scientific community needs to get a grip on its bias. Thankfully, the Creator gave them wonderfully-designed hands.

In his book, "Darwin's Doubt," Dr. Stephen Meyer quotes Chinese paleontologist J. Y. Chen: "In China," Chen says, "we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin."

A couple of Chinese researchers recently found this out the hard way when they published a paper on the workings of the human hand in the science journal PLOS ONE. Their title was innocuous enough: But a sentence in the abstract got these authors in a world of trouble: "… the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture …" they wrote, "is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way."

What? The creator mentioned in a scientific journal?

"As a scientist," protested one PLOS ONE editor, "I feel outraged by the publication of a [manuscript] making explicit reference to creationism."

This fellow and other staff members and editors — none of whom apparently saw the paper before publication — demanded its immediate retraction, and failing that, threatened to resign. The ominous hashtag "#Creatorgate" popped up on Twitter...

...The panic over this translation goof says a lot about the state of science. Not only does it call into question the peer review process, but it shows how averse the gatekeepers of published research are to anything that challenges the status quo. Writing in the London Times, Melanie Phillips suggests we've entered a kind of scientific "dark age."

Much of what passes for scientific literature today, she writes, is simply untrue. Peer-reviewed journals have lately published a slew of embarrassing hoaxes and fabrications.

Why the sloppiness? The scientific rat-race is partly to blame. Mounting pressure to meet publication quotas and win grants makes researchers prone to error.

But Phillips points to something else that might explain the bizarre panic over PLOS ONE's inadvertent nod to a Creator: "Underlying much of this disarray," she writes, "is surely the pressure to conform to an idea, whether political, commercial or ideological."...