Re: Date limit set on first Americans

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 16:04:46 +0100, Peter Ashby
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> Eric Stevens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> >3. Scientific Issues, How has the authors dealt with critiques
>> >   of similar types of works, or with logical inconsistencies
>> >   or weakness in approach. Experience of referees may often
>> >   give information on how a particular experimental approach
>> >   give deceptive results, how one can retest in a different way
>> >   to confirm. Is the work reproducing someone elses work. Is it 
>> >   a trivial variation of someone elses work. 
>> 
>> How would you have applied this to 'Origin of the Species'?
>
>On the Origin of Species was not a peer refereed paper, it was a book 
>which is a different thing entirely. Darwin had a number of papers in 
>the monograph literature. Try another analogy, or perhaps you have run 
>out of cheap shots?
>
>If you had your way the literature would be full of stuff noone could 
>trust, noone could check, noone could replicate. That is not science, it 
>is vanity publishing.

It's not a cheap shot. It's a perfectly valid question. My question
was centred on Philip's part-sentence "How has the authors dealt with
critiques of similar types of works ... ". This criterion  could not
be applied to Darwin as at that time there were no 'similar types of
work'. That point remains equally valid irrespective of whether he
published en masse (as he did) or in a steady flow of papers.

The book was not a 'peer reviewed paper' if only for the reason that
at that time in that field he had few, if any, peers.  It doesn't
matter that he published his ideas all at once. He would in any case
have run into the violent oppostion, remnants of which remain even
today (although not now in the scientific world). 



Eric Stevens