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Just received my (not at all unexpected) rejection from @eLife (after appeal).

The way I was rejected reflects the atrocious attitude of the journal & the whole field of biology towards conceptual work.

It also showcases an appalling lack of intellectual integrity on behalf of the journal editors.

I submitted the paper knowing full well that @eLife usually restricts its scope to empirical work. The idea was to challenge that restriction, since (in my opinion) biology urgently needs a revival of serious conceptual efforts to prevent the descent of the field into pointless construction of large data sets that are increasingly costly to produce but yield diminishing returns in terms of insight and understanding into the workings and organization of living systems.

Hence, no surprise when my work was deemed "out of scope." That's fair enough.

However, the initial rejection also mentioned that verbal arguments that are not of an empirical and preferably quantitative nature are "preliminary speculation." Now that is just a shockingly ignorant statement. This kind of narrow-minded positivism is appallingly naive.

What about the metaphysical assumptions behind the idea that only empirical/quantitative results are scientific? They are merely verbal, "preliminary speculation." So why can we trust our view that only empirical insights count? Well, we can't. That view is based on nothing.

After the initial rejection, I sent an email to the handling editor making this kind of point.
@eLife then invited me to lodge a formal appeal, which is what I did. I include the full appeal letter below.

Not surprisingly, the appeal was rejected, once again stating that the material is outside the scope of what
@eLife will publish. Again: fair enough.

But the editors couldn't leave it at that. They provided some additional "arguments." The first was: "this has been said before." Which is provably wrong. Why would you say this, if you had actually engaged with the argument in my paper? Well, you would not, which shows that there was no such engagement. What is the job of an editor again?

We are all pressed for time these days, but dismissing work without having even tried to understand it seems unprofessional. To say the least.

The next complaint was even stranger: the paper only presents one side of the #AI debate. Duh. The paper presents a perspective, which I use to criticize a prevalent view (computationalism). So intrinsically, the paper is designed in a multi-perspectival way. It just disagrees with the view that most of the people on
@eLife's editorial probably hold.

This is just a cheap excuse to shoot down differing perspectives. Yet, conceptual progress in science never comes from the mainstream. It always originates in well argued minority perspectives, which is exactly what this is. By shutting them down, you shut down progress.

Now, we wonder: why is the time since the 1950s so devoid of conceptual breakthroughs (not just in biology, but in science in general) while the first half of the 20th century was full of scientific revolutions?

Well, one reason is that we have set up an academic system of scientific research that shuts that kind of progress down. Systematically. If it still happens, it happens despite the system we have set up, not because of it.

The attitude exhibited by
@eLife here is a clear example of how this works. An editorial board full of minds with thoroughly conventional ideas about biology does not have time or incentive to engage with unconventional ideas. The same happens when you get grants reviewed.

In fact, we are completely deluded. The dismissive attitude of big players like
@eLife towards any deeper conceptual discussion cements this sad state of affairs. We're stuck. And it's hard to see how we get ourselves unstuck as long as such poor intellectual standards prevail.