Thread by @SwipeWright

1/ Online activists have successfully strong-armed a journal into retracting a published paper. This isn't how knowledge progresses.

This should be incredibly alarming to academics and anyone who supports free inquiry and rigorous scientific debate.
eneuro.org/content/7/2/EN…

2/ No paper is perfect. If a paper has passed peer-review and been published, and researchers find flaws in the study, then the proper course of action is to publish a response to the paper. Many journals are happy to publish responses and link to them from the original article.

3/ For example, this PNAS paper by Joel et al. claimed to find no difference in male & female brains. But many researchers subsequently identified a glaring flaw: they applied simplistic univariate statistics to measure a complex multivariate phenomenon. pnas.org/content/112/50…

4/ Did PNAS issue a retraction? No. Instead, they published FOUR expert responses to the paper that highlighted the statistical errors and demonstrated, using more robust multivariate analyses, exactly what was wrong with the original paper.

5/ The first, by Jonathan Rosenblatt, showed using only two variables that "A simple multivariate analysis using the same data suggests quite the opposite: Brains are indeed typically male or typically female." pnas.org/content/113/14…

6/ The second, by Marek Glezerman, criticized Joel et al's focus on morphology rather than functionality.

"Functionally, brains of women and men are indeed different. Not better, not worse, neither more nor less sophisticated, just different." pnas.org/content/113/14…

7/ The third, by Checkroud et al., analyzed MRI brain scans and found that "multivariate analyses of whole-brain patterns in brain morphometry can reliably discriminate sex." pnas.org/content/113/14…

8/ The fourth, by Del Giudice et al, applied Joel et al's methodology to facial morphology features in three different species of monkeys. I've highlighted their conclusion below. pnas.org/content/113/14…

9/ THIS is how science & knowledge progresses: by publishing reasoned critiques & responses. This helps educate researchers and the public not THAT certain claims are wrong, but WHY they are wrong.

We simply cannot allow mob-review to supplant peer-review. That's a dark path.

10/ As an evolutionary biologist I would be shocked to see a paper on Intelligent Design pass peer-review in a respectable scientific journal. But if one did, I would absolutely NOT call for retraction. I would instead encourage biologists to counter-publish detailed critiques.

11/ The author of the retracted paper, Stephen V Gliske, has issued a clear-headed response to the retraction on his blog at Medium. Please give it a read.

medium.com/@sgliske/respo…

12/ To close the circle on this, Joel et al. have also responded to the various criticisms of their paper I highlighted above. Read it for yourself and come to your own conclusions about this academic exchange.

This is how it should work! pnas.org/content/113/14…