Would peer revision give Darwin a chance?
OK, so it’s mid 19th century and Darwin has finished writing up his thoughts and ideas on Natural Selection.
Now let’s imagine that a major publishing group like Nature already existed and that Mr. Darwin submitted his paper to them. They then showed this mind boggling paper to the contemporary specialists in the fields of biology.
I’d suspect that they would probably reject the absurd findings and conclusions conjured up by Darwin and thus, the peer revision would recommend the publishing group ignore the paper and trash it.
So, in a nutshell, if peer revision existed back then like it does nowadays, would Darwin’s (and let’s not forget about Wallace) theory of evolution make it into the limelight?
[Image: Wikipedia (Nature)]
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qual é mesmo o interesse deste post ? Basta pensar que o peer-review da Nature e outras revistas semelhantes já deu muitos maus resultados (fusão-fria, etc.) e pensa lá agora que o Einstein não teve os primeiros artigos dele peer-reviewed, o Bohr achou que não era necessário. Obviamente por não passarem pelo crivo do peer-review da altura. Também interessante é o Sokal-affair e como ele se relaciona com o peer-review.
First of all, this blog is written and probably read mostly by people that read, speak and write in English. So please try keep posts in English, Thanks.
What’s the point of this post?
Well I understand what you tried to explain to me (in Portuguese), but the interest of my question, is in fact pretty much pertinent. I’m wondering if modern day style peer revision would let revolutionary thinkers like Darwin to progress, had it been put in action at that time (mid 19th century).
Someone did an experiment on this already. They submitted one of Einstein’s papers to a journal with the names changed. It was rejected outright. But then, Einstein was also absolutely furious when Physical Review dared to send his papers out for peer review (they had just begun experimenting with the idea at that point).
Plus most of what gets published in Nature (to pick on one of the boutique journals) is shoddy and faddish anyway.