First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
While seemingly confirming theory Fujita et al.’s result is decidedly fishy.
As a well-off mother experiences less conflict between offspring benefit and cost to herself and as raising nutritional value beyond the optimum confers no benefit, we expect the sex difference to be low at high SES and high at low SES, contrary to the reported result.
All their fat values are low compared to the nutritional literature standard value of 4 % and their 0.6 %, not an extreme but the regressed average for a subgroup, seems hardly viable.
They don’t state the sizes of their subgroups and don’t give enough data to infer them, but their regression average for high SES daughters is less than the extreme in their supplementary figure and far off its lower quartile. Was this a subgroup of size one?
Also there is a well known variance in fat content during each nursing episode, starting low and rising towards the end, making a sample of the very first 10 ml extremely unrepresentative.
In all a study that should neither have been offered nor accepted and was possibly only written to placate the grant supplier.
Higham is the last (and hardest to find) article in the Grotte du Renne dispute. Tartar, Ferentinos, and Lazuén all confirm the hypothesis of Neanderthal capabilities being much more similar to modern ones than previously accepted.
Considering the scatter and error in the data Miyake et al.’s contention, that a three year source fits them less well than shorter ones, is unwarranted.
Correll’s story is very real. The online editions of serious newspapers are regularly amended after the fact. In at least one case the PDF archive, purporting to be a faithful copy of the printed edition, has been meddled with. Interestingly that was when they had inadvertently admitted to purposely manipulating the public world-view.