The results by Duckworth are not really unexpected. Insofar it’s surprising, that to my knowledge this question has not been asked before.
Risen and Critcher do not tell whether they used science or chattering students. Still their subjects all were university students, so in all probability all of us too are not as objective and disinterested as we’d like to think.
Geologists have always considered warm times the good times for life and called them “optima”. Beal, Bowen, and Clementz show more uncertainties and unresolved issues in current doom scenarios.
The wave of advance model has long been proved wrong for the Neolithic and can’t describe the jumps and stops of its advance. So it is a surprise that Pérez-Losada and Fort find another distribution it can model rather well. How does a wrong theory yield such good results?
Here’s the link to this week’s complete list.