Darwin's Black Box - Peer Review Controversy

Peer Review Controversy

In 2005, while testifying for the defense in the Dover trial, Behe claimed under oath that the book had received a more thorough peer review than a scholarly article in a refereed journal, a claim which appears to conflict the facts of the book's peer review. Four of the book's five reviewers (Michael Atchison, Robert Shapiro, K. John Morrow, and Russell Doolittle) have made statements that contradict or otherwise do not support Behe's claim of the book passing a rigorous peer review.

Michael Atchison

Atchison has stated that he did not review the book at all, but spent 10 minutes on the phone receiving a brief overview of the book which he then endorsed without ever seeing the text.

Robert Shapiro

Shapiro has said that he reviewed the book, and while he agreed with some of its analysis of origin-of-life research, he thought its conclusions are false, though the best explanation of the argument from design that was available. Had the book been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal and this comment had appeared, the review provided by Shapiro would have forced the conclusions regarding intelligent design to be changed or removed.

K. John Morrow

Morrow criticized the book as appalling and unsupported, which contributed to the original publisher turning down the book for publication.

Russell Doolittle

Doolittle, upon whom Behe based much of his discussion of blood clotting, described it as misrepresenting many important points and disingenuous, which also contributed to the original publisher turning down the book for publication.

In the same trial, Behe eventually testified under oath that "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". The result of the trial was the ruling that intelligent design is not science and is essentially religious in nature.