So I went to see what he was actually whining talking about…
Apparently a paper titled “Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living” was submitted to the journal PLOS ONE. In the paper, there is this phrase:
”our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years”
And at the end of the paper, this appears:
”Hand coordination should indicate the mystery of the Creator’s invention.”
Then Ken goes on and on and on about “oh how can we even know they are talking about a Christian creator” while at the same time assuming that the retraction was based on anti-Christian bigotry. There is, as I’m sure you all can guess, no evidence of this. The term “creator”, whoever or whatever it might mean, does not belong in a scientific paper. When confronted about the use of the term, the authors of the paper claimed poor English speaking ability (3 of the authors were from China and one from Massachusetts) and that might be true, and if that is the case, the paper absolutely should be retracted considering we don’t know how much other information might have been “lost in translation”. Research papers have to be very exact in their language considering what they are trying to accomplish.
Also, there’s the phrase “proper design”… which is relying on some major assumptions, like the fact that we don’t actually know if there’s a better “design” or not, we just know that we have hands like we do. Assuming that our hands are the way they are on purpose absolutely reeks of ID. And considering we don’t know what the rest of the paper said, well, I’m guessing there were other major problems.
Ken of course continues to go on about how the mention of a creator was so brief!!! Oh just so brief… And apparently if the mention is brief, regardless of the fact that it greatly changes the meaning of the paper, it shouldn’t matter or something…
Unfortunately, just because a paper is submitted or even published in something like PLOS ONE doesn’t necessarily mean the research is actually good. From what I can see, the opinions on whether PLOS ONE is reputable or not vary more than those of journals like Nature or Science, and besides that, even reputable journals have papers that get retracted. I do think that PLOS ONE needs better editors, though, considering this made it to publication.
