Most obvious among the errors, neither Sternberg nor the Discovery Institute claims he was fired from his editorship. To claim that we have claimed this is pure straw man.

Second, the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) investigation cannot be dismissed so lightly (i.e., Republican ties=wrong). The investigation was well documented, with many of the conclusions based on e-mails from Smithsonian staff. Also, Morgan writes it off as an obvious publicity ploy since, supposedly, it was obvious from the start that the OSC had no jurisdiction. However, if you study Sternberg's site, you'll find that the issue of jurisdiction was a complicated one, and the OSC investigator noted that only a recent court ruling that related to the situation clarified that the OSC apparently had no jurisdiction to continue the case. That the OSC was able to investigate as much as they did was, nevertheless, invaluable, for the facts they turned up show quite clearly how some Darwinists treat scientific dissenters when they believe no one is watching.

Later, Morgan issues a correction to one of his "Facts" :

I earlier posted fact 10 after misreading Stranger Fruit's article, believing that Sternberg had admitted the identities of the three persons who reviewed Meyer's Helpless Monster, in fact it was the identities of the three persons who reviewed Sternberg's own article he admitted to. Wouldn't we all love to know the former identities? In Sternberg's "Acknowledgements" section:

I warmly thank Drs. Lien (Linda) Van Speybroeck, Gertrudis Van de Vijver, and Dani De Waele for their patience, encouragement, and comments and suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript. I also thank Drs. Paul Nelson, Stanley Salthe, Jonathan Wells, and Todd Wood (alphabetical order) for their very helpful criticisms of the manuscript.

Notice that there are layers of error here. Seven scholars providing feedback become, to Morgan, three (Wells, Wood, and Nelson). The incident is indicative of Morgan's seeing what fits his rubric, and leaving out everything that doesn't. Stanley Salthe, for instance, was also involved, a scientist with a major reputation. But the blogger conveniently doesn't emphasize his input.

Jonathan Wells called my attention to a still deeper layer of error:

I didn't hear what Rick said on O'Reilly, but Wells, Wood and Nelson were most emphatically NOT peer-reviewers. It is standard practice for the author of a scientific article to send his work to sympathetic colleagues for their comments, and to acknowledge their help. But "peer-review" refers to the practice by an editor of sending an article to third-party reviewers who recommend accepting or rejecting it for publication. I would be very surprised if Rick described us as "peer-reviewers" of his article in the Annals of the NY Academy of Sciences. Perhaps the blogger doesn't understand what "peer-review" is, in which case he has no business commenting on it in Rick's case.

In a follow-up post Morgan employs a good deal of ham-fisted either/or reasoning. For instance:

That is, why not just admit that he intended to publish this paper from the moment he spoke with Meyer at a conference about it, rather than pretend that Meyer's paper is "just another" that he processed according to the formal process that he followed to the letter? Why pretend he did not have a motive to incite controversy, and why feign surprise at the exact reaping of what he said he intended to sow?

Are these the only two options? Consider a third possibility? Sternberg thought Meyer's argument raised good questions. He also knew it was controversial and would stir the pot. He followed protocol but did so in a way that would give the paper a fighting chance to see daylight, knowing that there were dogmatic Darwinists who would band together to apply intense pressure on him to deep-six the paper no matter how worthwhile the questions it raised.

Perhaps the most damning moment in Morgan's posting on all of this comes in this passage: "Sternberg is using the three reviewers here as substantiation. If he really wants 'this whole thing to go away', a simple revelation of who these three were (obviously, with their permission) would relieve a lot of the burden that he claims to bear."

But why would the peer reviewers want to invite the sort of attacks Sternberg has experienced? It's a long held custom to grant peer reviewers anonymity. This allows the peer reviewers to criticize a paper with impunity (a good thing if the paper needs criticizing and the author has political clout in the scientific community). And it also allows the peer reviewer to safely support a paper that takes an unpopular position in the scientific community. Since ideas that challenge a reigning scientific paradigm always begin as a minority view in the scientific community, anonymity can play a crucial role in allowing iconoclastic arguments and ideas a hearing. There are ways to prevent this from happening, of course, and the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington has now, I think, tightened its editorial procedures to make sure nothing that offends the sensibilities of Nature magazine will ever again appear in their pages.

Ultimately the best defense of Sternberg's actions is the Meyer paper itself and, ironically, the only sustained critique of the paper, Meyer's Helpless Monster. The first is well reasoned and rooted in a review of the peer-reviewed literature. The critique, like Morgan's blog post, is riddled with error. Anyone who doubts this should read carefully the two-part rebuttal of the critique here and here.