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The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a non-profit professional society whose stated purpose is to investigate complex systems using information- and design-theoretic concepts. The organization promotes intelligent design, the controversial idea that there is scientific evidence for design in life.
Overview
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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 Dembski, Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells, and other notable figures including William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, Henry F. Schaefer, and Frank Tipler. Between a fourth and a third of the fellows also serve as fellows of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, the hub of the intelligent design movement.
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. Articles are submitted through its website and may appear in the journal if they have been approved by one of the fellows. This they argue is a form of peer review, though not the form typically practiced by journals, which Dembski believes "too often degenerates into a vehicle for censoring novel ideas that break with existing frameworks."
ISCID also hosts an online forum called Brainstorms and 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 supporting research papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Critics say that intelligent-design proponents have set up their own journals with "peer review" which lacks impartiality and rigor, and point to ISCID's journal Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design as an example, characterizing the ISCID fellows who comprise PCID's reviewers as "ardent supporters of intelligent design."
Notes and references
- ISCID Fellows, Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture Fellows
- " Articles accepted to the journal must first be submitted to the ISCID archive. To be accepted into the archive, articles need to meet basic scholarly standards and be relevant to the study of complex systems. Once on the archive, articles passed on by at least one ISCID fellow will be accepted for publication." . . . "The editorial advisory board peer-reviews articles submitted to the society's journal and comprises the society fellows." Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design
- William Dembski. "Peer Review or Peer Censorship?" Dembski cites as justification for PCID's peer review policy Frank Tipler's paper "Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?", which 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.
- "...ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications..." Judge John E. Jones III, ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (EDPa, 2005)
- John E. Jones III. Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 4: whether ID is science
- "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred". (Michael Behe, testifying in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District).
- ^ "With some of the claims for peer review, notably Campbell and Meyer (2003) and the e-journal PCID, the reviewers are themselves ardent supporters of intelligent design. The purpose of peer review is to expose errors, weaknesses, and significant omissions in fact and argument. That purpose is not served if the reviewers are uncritical." Index to Creationist Claims Mark Isaak, TalkOrigins archive 2006
- Bill Dembski and the case of the unsupported assertion Matt Inlay. Talk Reason.
- "ID leaders know the benefits of submitting their work to independent review and have established at least two purportedly "peer-reviewed" journals for ID articles. However, one has languished for want of material and quietly ceased publication, while the other has a more overtly philosophical orientation. Both journals employ a weak standard of "peer review" that amounts to no more than vetting by the editorial board or society fellows. Is It Science Yet?: Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution Matthew J. Brauer, Barbara Forrest, and Steven G. Gey (PDF file)