EvC Forum: Praise for the RATE Group

In the summer of 1985 Humphreys wrote to the journal Science pointing out that openly creationist articles are suppressed by most journals. He asked if Science had a hidden policy of suppressing creationist letters. Christine Gilbert, the letters editor, replied and admitted, It is true that we are not likely to publish creationist letters.

The first sentence here is unrelated to the rest of the paragraph. Letters are not journal articles -- they're letters to the editor. I don't doubt that Science would be reluctant to publish creationist letters; their subject matter is science, and creationism is not currently part of science. They probably don't publish letters about literary criticism either. In order for creationism to become part of science, it has to start producing peer-reviewed articles. Humphreys claims that creationist articles are suppressed, but does he have any evidence?

On May 19, 1992 Humphreys submitted his article *Compton scattering and the cosmic microwave background bumps to the Scientific Correspondence section of the British journal Nature. The editorial staff knew Humphreys was a creationist and didn’t want to publish it (even though the article did not contain any glaring creationist implications). The editorial staff didn’t even want to send it through official peer review. Six months later Nature published an article by someone else on the same topic, having the same conclusions.

Nature published no articles between 1991 and 1993 with the phrases "cosmic microwave" and "compton scattering" in their abstracts. They published only two papers about the cosmic microwave background during the right time frame, and neither was about Compton scattering. And, of course, as others have pointed out, getting rejected by Nature without peer review is hardly unusual. (Or so I've been told.

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