Our modern gods the scientists got it wrong again

Gintas sends this:

Hundreds of natural selection studies could be wrong, study shows

Scientists at Penn State and the National Institute of Genetics in Japan have demonstrated that several statistical methods commonly used by biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to produce incorrect results.

“Our finding means that hundreds of published studies on natural selection may have drawn incorrect conclusions,” said Masatoshi Nei, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and the team’s leader. The team’s results will be published in the Online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week ending Friday, April 3, 2009 and also in the journal’s print edition at a later date….

Nei said that to obtain a more realistic picture of natural selection, biologists should pair experimental data with their statistical data whenever possible. Scientists usually do not use experimental data because such experiments can be difficult to conduct and because they are very time-consuming.

Gintas comments:

Imagine: scientists usually do not use experimental data! It is easier to use a computer simulation generating statistics.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 27, 2009 10:48 AM | Send