Last week saw one blog explode with comments about a paper espousing creationism that had appeared in Proteomics, a peer-reviewed biology journal. This week, one of the paper’s authors sent the blogger an e-mail apology, and said he had asked that the paper be retracted.

Paul Z. Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota at Morris, posted on his blog the message from the author, Jin Han, of Inje University, in South Korea. Unfortunately, not much became clear, in part because of the message’s broken English.

Mr. Myers’s readers posted numerous examples last week of potentially plagiarized sections of Mr. Han’s paper. In his message to Mr. Myers, Mr. Han wrote, “I found the serious mistakes in the paper during the process of edits, which I confused between the early drafts and the latest versions: I did not check the use of the sentences in the references (more than 200 references). Finally I made serious error to make the final version.”

He did not mention the creationist statements in the paper, nor did he mention how peer review had affected the text of the article.

The editor of the Proteomics, Michael J. Dunn, has not responded to an inquiry today about the status of the paper. Mr. Han also has not responded to repeated requests for comment from The Chronicle. —Lila Guterman