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First the link to this week's complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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I agree with what Norton et al. try to conclude, but contrary to their claims their article provides nothing whatever to prove it. Nowhere do they show comparable data side by side. Their dog and human diagrams show completely different things produced by different methods and are dissimilar in every way. They tell us nothing. Nobody ever claimed human populations were as varied and distinct as dog breeds. The racist claim was, that the extreme and artificial differentiation through breeding in dogs is a graphic example of what long term selection can do and that a similar thing to much lesser degree has occurred in humans. And this is exactly what Norton et al.'s quoted numbers do show. They defeat a complete straw man of their own design by showing that skin (hair) colour alone is a useless predictor of temperament in dogs and horses. No-one ever claimed that for humans. Skin colour doubtlessly is a useful indicator for ethnicity and place of origin and it's that, which is claimed to correlate to other traits. That claim may well be nonsense, but Norton et al. do not even try to address it. This is doctrinal preaching and everyone old enough to remember the Eastern Bloc ought to recognize it as such.
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I have frequently noted – not criticised, these things happen – glaring and obvious errors in articles and asked, whether those reviewers, who supposedly evaluated the studies, have even scanned much less read them. But this is peanuts compared to what Oransky just dug up for Retraction Watch. The publisher in this case is Springer Nature, no less, and as far as I can tell there is no hint anywhere else in any of the supposedly reputable journals. Doesn't anyone care? Is this state of affairs considered normal now?
I have added the original by Seo et al. to the list so you can judge for yourselves how obvious that hoax is. I have highlighted all those bits shouting out at a single casual perusal of the text. (If you want an uninfluenced look, get your copy through the DOI.) Additional to those parts (I did not mark the bits Oransky had already pointed out, but they too are obvious enough) I have found all the cited literature to be about parasitology and pharmacology alone. There is not a single reference to their main content, the gravitational method. I might have missed that myself – although it is what I would have wanted to get more background on, had I believed it – but a serious reviewer must check these things if he was doing his job.
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If what Service reports were true, it would signify the definite breakthrough for renewable energy. A price of 1.3 cents for storing one kWh of electricity in batteries is more than ten times below everything I read before. His other number, 19 cents/kWh, is more plausible although the way he very misleadingly puts it implies this to be the price per capacity not per throughput over the lifetime – off by something like a thousand cycles. In his conclusion he states installed capacity as GW instead of GWh. He's quite obviously totally muddled and I tend not to believe a word of his more outrageous claims.
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Normally I would have written a lengthy comment on Delson and Harvati et al., but Wade has already comprehensively done so. She ends her comment with the quote “The evidence is very weak”
. And so it is.
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Gibbons too has only read the press release and perhaps the abstract but not the study by Feldman et al. itself. As I said a fortnight ago, in an admixture study you can only find what you are looking for. As the study compared Philistines to Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers, Chalcolithic individuals from Israel, and Chalcolithic individuals from western Iran, relative contributions from those three putative source populations is all you can get. That there is a share of European ancestry does not mean the people came from Europe, much less precisely from Greece, but only that they stem from a source population with European affinity. Looking at the principal component analysis, the closest and best fitting ones are the Luwians in eastern Anatolia as per Zangger’s hypothesis.
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I can't discern St. George's and Neukom et al.'s claims in any of their diagrams. The last part of extended figure 1c looks entirely normal compared to all of the millennium before 1000 CE and figure 2b shows several equally one-sided excursions. I've no idea what figure 3c is even supposed to mean. There are no signs of an event, that qua definition belongs to the last 150 years, occurring before 1800 CE. This tells me what? Even more perplexing, what do those few pixels near the South Pole mean, that do show something? In figure 4 what is the difference between 350 to 450 CE and 1850 to 1950 CE? They look totally similar to me. The only exceptional aberration in the diagram is the period from 1400 to 1900 CE lacking a single warm cluster. If anything the recent change looks like a return to the long-term normal. And all that does not include the fact that they compare proxy values in one period to measured ones in another, omitting all proxies they have. It has already been shown that all recent proxies significantly dampen the thermometric signal of the same time period. One has to compare like with like or prove that two different methods yield identical and comparable results. (Anderson 2013, Esper 2012, Frank 2010, Liu 2014, McIntyre & McKitrick 2003) To a lesser degree the last argument also applies to PAGES.
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I continue being quite concerned about all those attempts to place state-driven political propaganda on a sound scientific basis. True, Goldberg et al. do not offer anything new. Tearing down the boundary between the public and the private has been a central aim of all well-documented totalitarian regimes. Together with roping in easily influenceable children, be it Junge Pioniere, Red Guards, or Fridays for truancy, it has proved rather effective time and again. The reason is obvious. Talking among friends and family is less about substance than about socialising and bonding. So the ever-present Schweigespirale is nowhere more powerful than right here. You do not want to be controversial and go against the perceived consensus – and it has been demonstrated how skewed that perception can become under pervasive and unified mass media propaganda. What Goldberg et al. now add is further proof, refinement and quantification in a result to be abused at will.
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