Photograph by James Kocher.

Photography Contest, Honorable Mention.

I once published an article in a proprietary journal. It was new, it had no page charges, and I had no funding. Little did I know that it was the bare tip of an iceberg of proprietary journals that would, among other faults, strain university libraries to the breaking point. I have been apologizing ever since.

It gets worse. A day or so ago, a colleague sent us a post that included a press release to the effect that the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution, a proprietary Elsevier journal, had resigned en masse. Elsevier is an academic publishing firm that, according to Wikipedia, enjoyed a profit of £2.3 billion and a profit margin of 33 % in 2023.

According to the press release, which was posted by Mark Grabowski, a co-editor with Andrea B. Taylor, the Journal of Human Evolution is the “flagship journal in paleoanthropological and human evolution research,” but “Elsevier has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining [its] core principles and practices….” The editors note, among other complaints, that Elsevier has eliminated the position of copy editor on the grounds that “the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The result is that errors that were not found in the original manuscript are introduced during the production of the paper. The editors further complain about the cost of page charges and open access charges to institutions, and the relative paucity of institutions with whom Elsevier has negotiated open access agreements.

The two editors-in-chief, the emeritus editors, and all associate editors but one, “with heartfelt sadness and great regret,” therefore have resigned.

Finally, there is an elephant in the room, and he is hiding in plain sight in footnote 2: artificial intelligence. The press release notes that, without telling anyone, Elsevier introduced artificial intelligence during some phase of production and generated articles in which proper nouns (including epochs, site names, countries, cities, and genera) were not capitalized, and genera and species were not italicized. Thus, papers that had been properly formatted became embarrassingly wrong, and it took the persistent efforts of the editors over six months to resolve the problem. The footnote concludes, “AI processing … regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage.”

For more, see Evolution journal editors resign en masse to protest Elsevier’s changes in Retraction Watch. You may find Elsevier’s open access agreements here; there are only a couple of dozen or so in the United States. My thanks to several Panda’s Thumbelinos for providing the press release and making perceptive suggestions ahead of my drafting the present post.

Photograph by Marilyn Susek.

Photography Contest, Honorable Mention.

UPDATE, Dec. 22: I have now listed 52 separate events I found, including links and quotes of the summaries where available. Please contribute more in the comments!

Merry Kitzmas to all! Today is the 19th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, aka the Dover Panda Trial, held from September-November 2005, and decided on December 20, 2005.

Next year, 2025, will be the 20th anniversary of Kitzmiller, as well as the 100th anniversary of Tennessee v. Scopes, aka the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Stuck as I am, in Australia/New Zealand with 3 little kids, I expect I will have to follow events from afar. But I will use this thread to accumulate links & dates for relevant events as they come up. And please contribute ones you come across!

I expect that many are glum about current politics and science, but I recall a similar feeling in 2004, and that Kitzmiller v. Dover was one of the early signs that committed citizens could move events in a pro-science direction. May 2025 be another such time!

Summaries of events are posted below, with abstracts where available:

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Physicist Eric Hedin has posted to the Discovery Institute site Evolution News on 27 November 2024 an argument that the processes of physics cannot account for intelligent life. As he is a well-trained physicist (whose Ph.D. degree was from my university), and who has done experimental work on plasma physics, we can expect a mathematically sophisticated argument which would give us all pause.

Well, here’s the guts of his argument, from the Evolution News post:

In fact, for making anything other than large-scale conglomerations of matter (such as stars and planets), nature has only one tool in its bag — the electromagnetic force. This tool primarily manifests as the electric force, causing opposite charges (such as electrons and protons) to attract, and like charges to repel. It is completely indiscriminate, and cannot select between multiple options, preferring one charge over another, except for the rule that the bigger the charges and the closer the distance between them the stronger the resulting force. Can you imagine such blind, brute forces pulling together countless atoms of specific elements into the necessary configurations to result in a functioning laptop computer?

and

The “boundaries of science” refers to the common-sense conclusion that nature is limited in what it can produce to outcomes consistent with the laws and forces of nature. Natural processes are sought and found to be sufficient for natural phenomena, such as star formation or precipitation.

However, attempting to naturally explain the origin of some things found within our universe comes into conflict with the boundaries of science. Positing a natural explanation for the origin of the universe itself, the origin of the specific suite of physical parameters finely tuned to allow life, the origin of life itself, and the origin of conscious, intelligent minds, all defy what we have discovered about the limits of natural processes.

And basically, that’s the argument. Evolutionary biology does not pretend to address the origin of the universe, or the issue of fine-tuning in physics, and even the origin of life is outside its scope, though adjacent. But somehow Hedin knows that physical forces cannot explain “the origin of conscious, intelligent minds”. I wonder how he knows that.

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