bypassing the peer-review

L’extrait qui suit, de la critique du livre de Michael Behe par Richard Dawkins pourrait s’appliquer avec des légères modifications à tous les auteurs qui essaient de contourner l’évaluation de leurs théories par leurs pairs avant de les servir dans un livre grand-public.

If correct, Behe’s calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?

The best way to find out is for Behe to submit a mathematical paper to The Journal of Theoretical Biology, say, or The American Naturalist, whose editors would send it to qualified referees. They might liken Behe’s error to the belief that you can’t win a game of cards unless you have a perfect hand. But, not to second-guess the referees, my point is that Behe, as is normal at the grotesquely ill-named Discovery Institute (a tax-free charity, would you believe?), where he is a senior fellow, has bypassed the peer-review procedure altogether, gone over the heads of the scientists he once aspired to number among his peers, and appealed directly to a public that — as he and his publisher know — is not qualified to rumble him.

Link and emphasis mine.

Et quelque chose d’équivalent par Jerry Coyne

But it is Behe himself who has chosen to take his challenge to the social arena, publishing his ideas in a trade book and thereby bypassing the usual scientific route of having these ideas adjudicated by his peers. Both Richard Dawkins (in his review of The Edge of Evolution in The New York Times) and myself have noted Behe’s remarkable reluctance to submit his claims to peer-reviewed scientific journals. If Behe’s theory is so world-shaking, and so indubitably correct, why doesn’t he submit it to some scientific journals? (The reason is obvious, of course: his theory is flat wrong.)

Link and emphasis mine.