Blogging About Peer-Reviewed Research at the Discovery Institute.

[Casey Luskin has a post up](http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/02/leslie_orgel_metabolic_origin.html) over at the Discovery Institute's website that discusses [an article that was recently published in PLoS Biology](http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060018). The post itself is nothing particularly remarkable - Casey takes a paper that says that current hypotheses don't adequately deal with all of the problems of figuring out how life started, and claims that a lack of a workable hypothesis is evidence that an Intelligent Designer is needed to explain how life got here. Along the way to the argument from ignorance, he manages to misrepresent portions of the article, put words into the author's mouth, and use three little dots to chain sentences located paragraphs apart into a single quote. In most respects, it's a fairly typical example of Discovery Institute work.

This time, though, Casey added a little something extra to his usual work product. He stuck a little image up at the top left corner of his post. His use of the icon in question demonstrates an eagerness to assume the trappings of intellectual respectability without actually making the effort to be respectable.

The icon in question is the [ResearchBlogging.org](http://researchblogging.org/) "Blogging About Peer-Reviewed Research" icon. You may have seen the icon before. I'm [one](http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2008/01/assessing_diversity_in_the_pas.php) of a large (and growing) [number of bloggers](http://bpr3.org/?p=52) who have used the icon to mark posts that feature an in-depth discussion of an article found in the peer-reviewed literature. The ResearchBlogging.org website provides a single location where you can find all of the properly marked posts.

[Read more at The Questionable Authority, where comments may be left:](http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2008/02/blogging_about_peerreviewed_re.php)