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The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a non-profit professional society that investigates complex systems and promotes intelligent design, the controversial idea that there is scientific evidence for design in life.
Overview
The Society was launched on 6 December 2001. It was co-founded by William Dembski, Micah Sparacio and John Bracht. Dembski—mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and intelligent-design advocate—is its Executive Director. Its fellows include leaders of the ID movement, including Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells, and other notable figures including William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, Henry F. Schaefer, and Frank Tipler.
ISCID says that it is "a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism. The society provides a forum for formulating, testing, and disseminating research on complex systems through critique, peer review, and publication. Its aim is to pursue the theoretical development, empirical application, and philosophical implications of information- and design-theoretic concepts for complex systems." Its tagline is "retraining the scientific imagination to see purpose in nature".
ISCID maintains an online journal titled Progress in Complexity, Information and Design and hosts an online forum called Brainstorms for discussion of novel ideas and work in progress related to complex systems. It also maintains a copyrighted online user-written Internet encyclopedia called the ISCID Encyclopedia of Science and Philosophy.
The society features online chats with intelligent design proponents and others sympathetic to the movement or interested in aspects of complex systems. Past chats have included people such as Ray Kurzweil, David Chalmers, Stuart Kauffman and Robert Wright.
PCID peer review controversy
One of the primary criticisms of the intelligent design movement and hindrances to intelligent-design claims being considered legitimate science is that intelligent-design proponents have failed to produce research papers that appear in peer-reviewed scientific journals that support their position.
Critics say that intelligent-design proponents have set up their own journals with a weak standard of "peer review", and point to ISCID's journal Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design as an example. Articles are submitted to PCID through the ISCID website and may appear in the journal if they have been approved by one of the fellows. Critics note that the fellows consist almost exclusively of intelligent-design supporters and that the purpose of peer review is not served if reviewers are uncritical.
Critics further argue that PCID articles could not pass critical peer review in the rest of the scientific literature, that the journal by excluding the preponderance of mainstream research being conducted that contradicts intelligent design is displaying an institutional bias and lacks scholarly rigour, and that the journal has failed to appear several times, showing a lack of ideas and research for the intelligent design concept.
Dembski holds that peer review as typically practiced by journals "too often degenerates into a vehicle for censoring novel ideas that break with existing frameworks", citing as justification for PCID's policy Frank Tipler's paper "Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?" Tipler argues that journalistic peer review did not become a widespread requirement for scientific respectability until after World War II, that many great ideas did not appear first in peer-reviewed journals, that outstanding physicists have complained that their best ideas were rejected by such journals, and that the refereeing process now works primarily to enforce orthodoxy.
Notes and references
- John E. Jones III. Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 4: whether ID is science
- Matthew J. Brauer, Barbara Forrest, Steven G. Gey. "Is It Science Yet?: Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution", p. 95. (PDF file)
- Mark Isaak. Index to Creationist Claims: Claim CI001.4, Response 2c.
- William Dembski. "Peer Review or Peer Censorship?"
- Frank Tipler. "Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?"