User:JWSchmidt/Blog/25 February 2007

Science, Protoscience, Pseudoscience  Continuing activity at Science and the nonphysical finally prompted my to get around to making Pseudoscience and Protoscience to complement What is science?. I'm now thinking about the possibility of starting something like Topic:Intelligent Design as a content development project within School:Doing science. If there really is a way to scientifically study anything, then it should be possible to have learning resources about how to conduct a scientific investigation into the possibility of Intelligent Design. However, my imagination only extends to a kind of expanded science of Topic:Exobiology that would involve searching for indications of an extraterrestrial intelligence that might have previously influence the course of life on Earth. This might also be a constructive direction along which to develop UFO research.

Another possibility would be to do something along the lines of Mind-Body Intervention. This could have the advantage of providing a sensible start to Complementary and Alternative Medicine within School:Medicine. Mind-Body Intervention does not even make the main page of the website for the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Their main mind-body page lists 19 references that would be a reasonable reading list for a Wikiversity learning project.

I noticed today that the article "A community experiment with fully open and published peer review" says this, "The journal will publish 'essentially anything', even papers that receive three unanimously negative reviews, the only conditions being that three Editorial Board members agree to review (or solicit a review for) the manuscript and that the work qualifies as scientific (not pseudoscientific as is the case for intelligent design or creationism) – and, of course, that the author wants his/her paper published alongside the reviews it receives."