Wikipedia:Peer review/Intelligent design/archive2

Old Peer Review

Intelligent design

A controversial topic, and one, more than most, where WP:NPOV needs intelligence and care to apply - Undue Weight seems to be key: This is not an accepted scientific theory, and is not even a scientific theory, as numerous sources show. Despite this, I think we've managaed pretty well, and this deserves FA, I think, so what more needs done? Adam Cuerden ^talk 02:38, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Adam - Overall it looks like a very good and fair coverage of a controversial topic. It is obviously well sourced, and clearly a lot of work has gone into it. I have several comments, but they are all just reactions I had reading through. Feel free to ignore any of them if you have even the slightest reason to do so. Thanks.

• Would it be possible to switch to a different referencing scheme, or make multiple references in a single footnote. I find the 7 footnotes after a sentence in the lead a bit distracting.
• I find this sentence a little odd "It stands in opposition to conventional biological science, which relies on the scientific method to explain life through observable processes such as mutation and natural selection." In particular, I think may advocates of intelligent design would not take kindly to the suggestion that they aren't using the scientific method. Also, the "observable" tag seems a bit odd, since the biological explanation for the evolution of life relies on large scale speciation which (as I understand it) we have never observed
• "Intelligent design in the late 20th century can be seen as a modern development of natural theology which seeks to change the basis of science and undermine evolution theory." Its not clear what you mean by "basis of science" here. Could this sentence be made more clear?
• There is inconsistent capitalization of "god".
• "Whether this was a genuine feature of the concept or just a posture taken to avoid alienating those who would separate religion from the teaching of science has been a matter of great debate between supporters and critics of intelligent design." I find the wording "genuine feature of the concept" a bit awkward. Could the sentence say something like "whether Christianity can be separated from ID..."?
• "Critics of both intelligent design and the weak form of the anthropic principle argue that they are essentially a tautology; in their view, these arguments amount to the claim that life is able to exist because the universe is able to support life." I found this statement a bit jarring. The explication of the argument in the previous paragraph isn't on face a tautology. Perhaps another sentence explaining why the argument is a tautology?
• While I thought the paragraph was helpful, I found the second paragraph in the Intelligent designer section a bit out of place. That section is meant, I presume, to explicate the concept of the intelligent designer, while the second paragraph is more of an objection to the view as a whole (not just this one part). Could it be moved somewhere else?
• "Phillip E. Johnson stated that the goal of intelligent design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept." This sentence seems out of place with respect to the rest of that paragraph.
• The separation (or lack thereof) between ID and Christianity reoccurs in several places. It seemed repetitive. Would there be a way to put it all in one place? (This might not be possible, I understand if not.)
• "Natural science uses the scientific method to create a posteriori knowledge based on observation alone (sometimes called empirical science)." My complaint here is with the word "alone". This sounds like empiricism which has largely been abandoned because of apparently non-empirical standards being widely used in science. For instance, preference for unification or simplicity in scientific theories doesn't appear to have an empirical grounding. Methodological naturalism isn't the same as saying only use observation. It means something akin to: don't postulate supernatural entities.
• "Furthermore, intelligent design is neither observable nor repeatable, which critics argue violates the scientific requirement of falsifiability." This is a bit inexact. "Intelligent design isn't repeatable or observable" is a bit weird. Of course its not repeatable or observable, it's a theory. The general theory of relativity isn't observable or repeatable either. I think what you mean to say is that ID doesn't entail an observable predictions and no repeatable experiments can verify it.
• "This presents a demarcation problem, which in the philosophy of science is about how and where to draw the lines around science." This sentence is awkward, can it be made more clear?
• The way you present the list of features of science makes it sound uncontroversial. I suspect it's not. Perhaps you could be more specific where it comes from, and say that this list includes the commonly cited features of scientific method.
• "The debate over whether intelligent design produces new research, as any scientific field must, and has legitimately attempted to publish this research, is extremely heated." This sentence is a bit awkward too.

Again, a great article. --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 04:06, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Intelligent design

Adam - Well done overall, though the introduction seems a little biased, i appreciate that your sources are equalized later on. You've obviously put a lot of effort into this. This is how i would re-word the second paragraph to smooth things over a little bit, and to remain as journalistic as possible:

The majority of scientific community views intelligent design as unscientific,[13] as pseudoscience[14] or as junk science.[17] The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that intelligent design "and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their own.[19] Theistic scientists who are members of the Intelligent Design Network argue that this too is a subjective stance for, "The assumption is inconsistent with evidence collected per the scientific method that the biological information processing systems and networks of life may be the product of intelligence." (http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/tenreas.PDF)

peace, maegan