{"id":43339,"date":"2011-08-26T21:07:59","date_gmt":"2011-08-27T05:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=13682"},"modified":"2011-08-26T21:07:59","modified_gmt":"2011-08-27T05:07:59","slug":"slate-science-and-brian-palmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/08\/26\/slate-science-and-brian-palmer\/","title":{"rendered":"Slate, science, and Brian Palmer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2301906\/\">Brian Palmer<\/a> piece in <em>Slate<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2301906\/\">Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless<\/a>. It&#8217;s of a quality which would make it appropriate for <em>WorldNetDaily<\/em>. Here are the responses of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasoncollins.org\/2011\/08\/underestimating-heritability\/\">Jason Collins<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.genomesunzipped.org\/2011\/08\/heritability-and-twins-yet-again.php\">Daniel MacArthur<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2011\/08\/twin-studies.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed:+marginalrevolution\/feed+(Marginal+Revolution)\">Alex Tabarrok<\/a>. The comments at <em>Slate <\/em>were rather scathing too. I observed over at <em>Genomes Unzipped<\/em> that many of the assertions in the piece were in the &#8220;not even wrong\/what does that even mean?&#8221; class. Palmer is apparently a freelancer at <em>Slate<\/em>, and they&#8217;re doing a bunch of stories on twins this week. I wonder if they just sent him the assignment with instructions on the slant, and he took it a little too far. Even if it was a polemic it was a shoddy and embarrassing\u00a0one. My main concern is that many people perceive <em>Slate <\/em>to be an organ which publishes &#8220;smart&#8221; and well researched pieces, and they&#8217;ll take Palmer&#8217;s screed at face value.<\/p>\n<p>The scientific problems with the article are legion. But still: <strong>how does something like this get published in a relatively high-end publication<\/strong>? Brian Palmer has editors presumably. If the copy was an undergraduate paper the prose would be &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/3vEqzM3t_6I\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It&#8217;s of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason C&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85,1698,4,481,525,1699,1694],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-behavior-genetics","category-brian-palmer","category-genetics","category-human-genetics","category-human-genomics","category-slate","category-twin-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43339"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43356,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43339\/revisions\/43356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}