Pulling a fast one: getting unscientific nonsense into scientific journals. (or, how PLOS ONE f*#ked up)

The basis of all of science is that we can explain the natural world through observation and experiments. Unanswered questions and unsolved riddles are what drive scientists, and with every observation and hypothesis test, we are that much closer to understanding the universe. However, looking to supernatural causes for Earthly patterns is not science and has no place in scientific inquiry. If we relegate knowledge to divine intervention, then we fundamentally lose the ability to explain phenomena and provide solutions to real world problems.

Publishing in science is about leaping over numerous hurdles. You must satisfy the demands of reviewers and Editors, who usually require that methodologies and inferences satisfy strict and ever evolving criteria -science should be advancing. But sometimes people are able to 'game the system' and get junk science into scientific journals. Usually, this happens by improper use of the peer review systems or inventing data, but papers do not normally get into journals while concluding that simple patterns conform to divine intervention.

Such is the case in a recent paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. This is a fairly pedestrian paper about human hand anatomy and they conclude that anatomical structures provide evidence of a Creator. They conclude that since other primates show a slight difference in tendon connections, a Creator must be responsible for the human hand (well at least the slight, minor modification from earlier shared ancestors). Obviously this lazy science and an embarrassment to anyone that works as an honest scientist. But more importantly, it calls into question the Editor who handled this paper (Renzhi Han, Ohio State University Medical Center), but also PLOS ONE's publishing model. PLOS ONE handles thousands of papers and requires authors to pay for the costs of publishing. This may just be an aberration, a freak one-off, but the implications of this seismic f$@k up, should cause the Editors of PLOS to re-evaluate their publishing model.