>>11930645So, it's mainly this
>>11930670The first thing to do would be to find each of those articles and examine the methodology. For example, the "#3" section, BMC Evolutionary Biology - that's not a source I've ever heard, but I try to avoid publication bias when possible. I can't be bovvered but immediately when I saw all that info on neurological development, I kinda chuckled. How are they getting that data? Neuron development, positive regulation of neural differentiation, hindbrain dev, D/V neural tube patternings - are they taking autopsy data? if so, are they accounting for:
>diet & nutrition>education>exercise>pollutants/contaminants in environment>socioeconomics (aka how likely could they have addressed the above despite their environmental conditions)or did they just grab a bunch of autopsy data from wherever they could get their hands on it? then, how do you look at neural development across members of a "subspecies" without directly examining neural tissue across various individuals of different stages of development who are otherwise comparable to the above-greentext criteria. If they did MRI or other non-invasive means, that's fine but they would've had to have mentioned that somewhere and also cost-prohibitive so then you need to ask what the sample size was and if it was sufficient to reduce sampling error.
Overall, just look at the fucking graphs, they're terrible, the way they organize their data is very suspect. The first chart is ridiculous, they don't even bother to mention what gene clusters they're looking at, for all you know they could've ordered the data biased to give such specific groupings. Some of the papers they cite don't even have dates, which makes me wonder - how old are they?
Most of the rest of it is socioeconomic analysis which I'm not going to bother with since it's not my expertise, but overall you can refute a lot of this on methodological basis if you actually bother to look up the papers.
