Saved by Science: Hand-of-God Paper Yanked from Peer-Reviewed Journal for Crediting 'Creator'

Let’s have give a big hand for the scientific community for its latest triumph of dogma over exploration and dissent. Once again, we’ve been saved from ideas which veer from post-modern orthodoxy. In this case, peer pressure got a peer-reviewed article yanked from a scientific journal called PLOS One, an “open-access” digital publication from the nonprofit Public Library of Science.

The paper, titled: ‘Biomechanical characteristics of hand coordination in grasping activities of daily living‘ was written by a team of four researchers, three from Huazhong University in China, and one from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

The long arm of intellectual monoculture smacked down the hand of God, or rather, forced the retraction of a paper that seemed to attribute the magnificent mechanics of the human hand to a “creator.”

However, members of the scientific community have demanded the paper be retracted, for its several perceived references to the pseudoscientific theory of intelligent design and a possibly divine ‘Creator’.

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In the opening sentences of the study, it claims the link between muscles and hand movements is the product of “proper design by the Creator.”

Later, it says human hand coordination “should indicate the mystery of the Creator’s invention,” and concludes by again claiming the mechanical architecture of the hand is the result of “proper design by the Creator.”

Thank goodness scientists know how to jointly exercise message discipline and enforce doctrine with an iron fist. The authors were fingered for thumbing their noses at the standard neo-Darwinian talking points which reject intelligence…in the design of the material universe that is.

It reminds me of when my daughter, then pre-teen, watched as a science teacher used a series of drawings of the bone structure of hands, flippers and hooves to show how their similarities demonstrate unguided adaptation via natural selection.

My little girl raised her hand and then politely suggested: “Or, it could mean they were all designed by the same artist.”

The teacher smiled, acknowledged it could, and moved on.