{"id":38729,"date":"2011-08-28T15:44:44","date_gmt":"2011-08-28T15:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/slate-science-and-brian-palmer-gene-expression\/"},"modified":"2011-08-28T15:44:44","modified_gmt":"2011-08-28T15:44:44","slug":"slate-science-and-brian-palmer-gene-expression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/slate-science-and-brian-palmer-gene-expression.php","title":{"rendered":"Slate, science, and Brian Palmer | Gene Expression"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&rsquo;m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2301906\/\">Brian Palmer<\/a> piece in <em>Slate<\/em>, <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2301906\/\">Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless<\/a>. It&rsquo;s of a quality which would make it appropriate for <em>WorldNetDaily<\/em>. Here are the responses of <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.jasoncollins.org\/2011\/08\/underestimating-heritability\/\">Jason Collins<\/a>, <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.genomesunzipped.org\/2011\/08\/heritability-and-twins-yet-again.php\">Daniel MacArthur<\/a>, and <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2011\/08\/twin-studies.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29\">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 &ldquo;not even wrong\/what does that even mean?&rdquo; class. Palmer is apparently a freelancer at <em>Slate<\/em>, and they&rsquo;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&nbsp;one. My main concern is that many people perceive <em>Slate <\/em>to be an organ which publishes &ldquo;smart&rdquo; and well researched pieces, and they&rsquo;ll take Palmer&rsquo;s screed at face value.<\/p><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 ...<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/96bff_3vEqzM3t_6I\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/96bff_PIZJdpbID5k\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&rsquo;m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It&rsquo;s of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason Collins, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/slate-science-and-brian-palmer-gene-expression.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}