The Sternberg peer review controversy concerns the conflict arising from the publication of an article supporting pseudoscientific intelligent design creationism in a scientific journal, and the subsequent questions of whether proper editorial procedures had been followed and whether it was properly peer reviewed.
On 4 August 2004, an article by Stephen C. Meyer (Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture) titled "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories", appeared in the peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Meyer's article was a literature review article, and contained no new primary scholarship itself on the topic of intelligent design. The following month, the publisher of the journal, the Council of the Biological Society of Washington, released a statement repudiating the article and stating that their former editor, biologist Richard M. Sternberg, handled the entire review process in an unusual manner, without consultation or review from an associate editor. The position of editor was unpaid and voluntary, and Sternberg had put in his resignation from it six months earlier. Sternberg disputes the Council's statement and asserts that the paper was appropriately peer reviewed by three biologists who "concluded that [the paper] warranted publication".
The same statement from the Council vowed that proper review procedures would be followed in the future and endorsed a resolution published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which states that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting intelligent design. On September 18, the Discovery Institute issued a statement praising the publication of Meyer's paper in a peer-reviewed journal and chastising the National Center for Science Education for stating that the paper should not have been published. The Biological Society of Washington's president, Roy McDiarmid, called Sternberg's decision to publish Meyer's article "a really bad judgment call on the editor's part" and said it was doubtful whether the three scientists who peer reviewed the article and recommended it for publication were evolutionary biologists.
The event has been used to support an unsubstantiated but common narrative of persecution.
Background Richard M. Sternberg Richard M. Sternberg is an American evolutionary biologist who has completed a BS degree from University of South Carolina and has two PhDs: the first from 1995 in molecular evolution from Florida International University, and a second in systems science from Binghamton University. He did post-doctoral work between 1999 and 2001 at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) at the Smithsonian Institution, on the phylogeny of crabs.
In February 2001 he began work as an invertebrate taxonomist for the National Institutes of Health at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, later becoming a staff scientist. The position allowed time for research work, and he continued at the NMNH, now as an unpaid research associate. Soon after starting work, he agreed to take on the unpaid position of Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a taxonomic journal which usually publishes descriptions of newly identified species. Also in 2001, he joined the editorial board of the Baraminology Study Group, a young earth creationist "creation science" attempt to identify and classify the created kinds mentioned in scripture. He has stated that he is an outside critic and remained skeptical of their young earth beliefs.BSG: A Creation Biology Study Group Around this time he was sympathetic to historic ideas of structuralism of patterns in nature, but could not go from that to inferring the existence of a designer. He occasionally met proponents of intelligent design, and in 2002 presented a lecture on formal causation to the ISCID intelligent design group's "Research And Progress in Intelligent Design" (RAPID) conference.RAPID schedule
In October 2003 Sternberg resigned from being editor of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, with a commitment to edit issues over the coming year. Early in 2004 intelligent design advocate Stephen C. Meyer contacted Sternberg about a manuscript that he was thinking of submitting to the journal. Sternberg advised him he would have to become a member of the Society, and in a few weeks Meyer sent him copies of the manuscript with evidence of membership. Sternberg went ahead with the review and editing process, and Meyer's article appeared in the journal on 4 August 2004. This was already scheduled to be the second last issue that Sternberg would edit. In a statement issued by 10 October 2004 the journal declared that Sternberg had published the paper at his own discretion without following the usual practice of review by an associate editor. The Council and associate editors would have considered the subject of the paper inappropriate for publication as it was significantly outside "the nearly purely systematic content" of the journal. The Council endorsed a resolution "which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis", and that the paper therefore "does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings".
Sternberg continued in his job as a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information until 2007, and continued to hold the unpaid position of Research Associate at the NMNH, which was extended on 15 November 2006 by a further three year appointment as an unpaid 'research collaborator' at the NMNH. After 2007 Sternberg became a research scientist at the intelligent design Biologic Institute, supported by a research fellowship from the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, of which Stephen Meyer is a co-founder and currently director.
Sternberg is a Roman Catholic "who attends Mass." from David Klinghoffer, a Discovery Institute fellow He subscribes to the process structuralism school of thought. In 2005 he said he was not a proponent of intelligent design. from Michael Powell, a Washington Post staff writer He has more recently described his position as one that "can accept all that is empirically valid in evolutionary biology, while not axiomatically dismissing the position that structures as well as their "real" instantiations have an intelligent cause", and asserts that the universe emanates from Nous (mind), so that his thinking "is compatible with intelligent design broadly defined". Sternberg serves as a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (ISCID), an intelligent design group.ISCID – Fellows He is also a signatory to the Discovery Institute's Scientific Dissent from Darwinism petition.
The peer review process Sternberg insists the paper was properly peer reviewed, and rejects the reason given by the journal for disavowing the article, saying:
A series of articles in Skeptic criticized the decision to publish the article. Michael Shermer disputed Sternberg's qualifications as a peer reviewer, stating that it dealt less with the areas Sternberg was qualified to review (systematics and taxonomy) than it did paleontology, for which many members of the society would have been better qualified to peer review the paper; at that time the Society had three members who were experts on Cambrian invertebrates, the subject discussed in Meyer's paper. A follow-up article by Ed Brayton criticized Sternberg's decision to review the paper, given his ties to a known movement that opposes the theory of evolution:
Doubts were raised whether the reviewers were evolutionary biologists. According to an article by the Society of Academic Authors Meyer said the article grew out of a presentation he made at a conference attended by Richard Sternberg where they discussed the possibility of a paper for society's journal. Observers have pointed to affiliations that in most circumstances would have disqualified Sternberg from reviewing an article on intelligent design. They note that Sternberg is a Fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, a Discovery Institute-affiliated group dedicated to promoting intelligent design. Sternberg is also a signatory of the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."
Sternberg claims to have also checked with a Council member and to have followed the standard practice for peer review:
Of the four "well-qualified biologists with five PhDs" Sternberg identifies, one was Sternberg himself, contributing his double doctorate to the total he cited. Sternberg's claim of following proper peer review procedures directly contradicts the published public statement of his former employer, the publisher of the journal, that the proper procedures were not followed resulting in the article's retraction. In previous years the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington had published yearly lists of all the people who had served as peer reviewers. That list is absent for 2004, the year of the incident. Sternberg has repeatedly refused to identify the three "well-qualified biologists",•http://www.rsternberg.net/.•. citing personal concerns over professional repercussions for them. The Office of Special Counsel determined that Sternberg complied with all editorial requirements of the Proceedings and that the Meyer article was properly peer reviewed by renowned scientists.
Criticism In a review of Meyer's article The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories, Alan Gishlick, Nick Matzke, and Wesley R. Elsberry claimed it contained poor scholarship, that it failed to cite and specifically rebut the actual data supporting evolution, and "constructed a rhetorical edifice out of omission of relevant facts, selective quoting, bad analogies, knocking down straw men, and tendentious interpretations". Further examination of the article revealed that it was substantially similar to previously published articles co-authored by Meyer.Meyer and Deja Vu Revisited , Wesley R. Elsberry, The Panda's Thumb, September 26, 2004.