EOL endorses intelligent design. This is one of the messages a naive reader might take from reading an interview with Paddy Patterson in this weeks Nature. Paddy is one of the architects of the Encyclopedia of Life project, and is leading the development of EOL’s informatics infrastructure. Of course, EOL does not endorse intelligent design, or any particular viewpoint for that matter. Paddy’s message is that EOL will allow people to create a customized view of the Encyclopedia that can be censored not offend the sensibilities of particular groups of users. Unfortunately I am not sure most of EOL’s potential contributors will see it this way.

The success of EOL, especially at this early stage of the project will rest on the willingness of contributors to provide content. In many cases these contributors are the same people that have devoted their lives to studying the evolutionary relationships of life on Earth. I doubt these scientists will be keen to see their efforts used to promote pseudoscientific or religious opinions within EOL. For example, much of EOL’s initial content is likely to come from the Tree-of-Life project, an initiative spearheaded by some of the worlds leading authorities in the construction and analysis of evolutionary trees.

Doubtless, Paddy’s comments will cause some controversy in the coming days. Paddy alluded to this himself in the article. This begs the question, was it a mistake? As it happens I believe it was, but not for the reasons that most will argue. Sections of society will always bend and abuse information to support unsubstantiated views and opinions. Information that becomes embedded within the Encyclopedia of Life will be no different. What is more alarming and what I consider to be the “mistake”, is that Paddy appears to conflate different interpretations about data (Intelligent Design, Creationism etc), with the different presentational “views” of the same underlying data. Paddy’s description the Encyclopedia as a space for presenting multiple opinions about the organization of life on Earth is problematic, not because everyone should not be able to have an equal say in the matter (see below) but because the bulk of the Encyclopedias audience will be naive users. Without some method to choose between these different opinions, users will see little value in the Encyclopedia.

As I have already mentioned in previous blog posts, the views and opinions of contributors to EOL (no matter how crazy or disliked) can be accommodated within an infrastructure that permits the Encyclopedia of Life to be written. But definitive encyclopedic component of EOL should NOT be the place for this multiverse of opinion. The Encyclopedia should present a consensus that is an algorithmically reconciled function of the discrepancies present in the underlying content. For it to be useful the Encyclopedia must present ONE view to a naive user – the algorithmic equivalent of Google News for biodiversity data. This obviously won’t be the definitively correct view. In many cases it may not even be the “best” view – but most importantly it will be ONE view of life on Earth. It is perfectly possible for the underlying data be “presented” to different communities of users in different ways (a school child will not want the same information as a molecular biologist), but this should not be conflated with the notion that there is still one underlying set of information that has been selected to build these different presentations.

The place for the different views and opinions about the diversity of life is in the underlying workbench used to write the Encyclopedia. This is where differences of opinion should be presented and published on an equal footing. The success of EOL will rest on this workbench; since this is the environment contributors will interface with to build most of EOL’s content. This environment must allow communities of contributors to build a consensus of opinion about how biodiversity information should be presented in their own area of specialization (such as with the Scratchpads I am working on). What EOL needs to do is create the infrastructures that binds this content together, and determine the optimality criteria that goes into the algorithms to reconcile this content. To my mind this is what the Encyclopedia of Life project is really about.