Dear editors:

'Creator' is another metaphoric name for 'nature' in Chinese. That is the other side of the story, which you, and most of the people condemning the paper do not see.

To put it simply, in the long history of China, there was rarely any period of time that any sort of religion or atheism was considered a sin at all. The Chinese, unlike the European, has never initiated war or ?crusade? against any belief system.

Therefore, unlikely the European, we did not need sacrifices or even science to embrace the idea of ?religious tolerance?. It has always been a tradition, ingrained in our culture and language. Using ?Creator? as a metaphor for ?Mother Nature?, it is way of saying ?regardless of what you believe in, you need to see the wonder in this masterpiece?. I can instantly tell that was the authors intended to say, from a native speaker?s perspective, and from someone who has worked in the field of linguistics and neurolinguistics for a little while.

The point of this incidence, in my opinion, is to open the discussion of ?how to help people write in good, standard English in the peer review process?, not to ?push them away from the English publishing world?.

I do think the authors should apologize, but retracting their paper and condemning them is crude and unnecessary. It has become a bully, not an education.

Last but not least, I do think the escalation of this whole incident, is partly due to the ignorance of the western Internet world. I do not want to say ?cultural discrimination?, because most of the people, are not intentional. But I do think that many people have ?cultural ignorance?.

Just because they think the word ?Creator? definitely has 100% religious connotation, and has perfect correlation with Creationism, the rest of the world must define the word the same way.


In fact, majority of the Chinese people are atheists. This is EXACTLY the reason that we are not as sensitive as the westerners are to the word ?Creator?. Because we do NOT fear that Creationism will come back. We never believe it in the first place.

I need to say that, this ignorance and verbal condemnation on the internet coerced the editors of Plos One to make the decisions. A lot of people said a lot of hurtful things towards phenomena that they do not even understand.

Thank you