Reprinted from the Lexington Herald-Leader with permission of the author. Photographs courtesy of Dan Phelps.

In June 2018, 35 public middle and high school students from Bell, Harlan and Letcher counties were taken by Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College on a “college preparation” field trip that included the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.

This was documented in the Middlesboro Daily News on Aug. 7. Information I received via an open-records request indicates the community college spent more than $1,300 for tickets to the Ark and Creation Museum plus additional travel expenses.

Both the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter are run by the young-earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis. It is a fundamentalist Christian apologetic ministry with the stated aim of instructing Ark and museum visitors that the Bible is literally true, and converting them to their version of Christianity.

By taking students to these venues, the community college’s program, which is a public, state-supported institution, unconstitutionally used tax monies to promote a specific religious message.

Moreover, the Kentucky Constitution forbids the use of taxpayer dollars to support a ministry.

Perhaps more importantly, the exhibits at the Ark and Creation Museum are scientifically unsound and go against the idea of preparing high school students for college-level work.

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I have a vague recollection of reading a short article by a psychologist, in which the author and his colleague separately performed meta-analyses on certain parapsychological data. Meta-analysis involves, among other things, rating the studies under discussion as to their quality. The psychologist gave low ratings to many studies to which his colleague gave high ratings, and vice versa. The result: the psychologist’s colleague concluded that the data supported the existence of whatever phenomenon they were studying, whereas the psychologist concluded the opposite. In other words, each evaluated the data subjectively and performed a meta-analysis that was more or less stacked to come to the conclusion that they wanted or expected. If I remember correctly, the psychologist concluded that meta-analyses must not be particularly useful.

I cannot find that article, if it exists, but I suspect that the author was Ray Hyman. Professor Hyman discusses meta-analyses and parapsychology in a longer article here. In that article, Prof. Hyman notes that he and the statistician Jessica Utts evaluated a certain data set regarding parapsychology and came to opposite conclusions.

Notably, Prof. Hyman once performed a meta-analysis on the original ganzfeld experiments (never mind what those experiments involved), and concluded, in essence, that the experiments had been performed poorly. The parapsychologist Charles Honorton famously performed his own meta-analysis and drew the opposite conclusion. As Prof. Hyman notes, he and Mr. Honorton obtained results consistent with their preconceptions. They agreed that the database had enough problems that they could fairly draw no firm conclusions. The ganzfeld analyses failed because the two experimenters could not agree as to the quality of the data. Other meta-analyses fail, for example, because of what is often called the file-drawer effect, that is, that unsuccessful experiments are not published but rather are left in the file drawer.

I have just related almost everything I knew about meta-analyses, until the other day when The metawars by Jop de Vrieze appeared in Science magazine. Now I know that meta-analyses are burgeoning because they are relatively inexpensive to perform – yet they are still inconclusive, partly because of the way researchers choose or rate the studies they include or how they try to correct for the file-drawer effect.

The Science paper is long, and I do not want to recapitulate it. It appears, though, that meta-analysts agree that, if they cannot make meta-analyses objective, at least they can make them transparent, so that they may be criticized. Others argue that protocols should be published in advance of the meta-analysis, and in particularly controversial cases “rival researchers” should get together and set up a meta-analysis of their own, if they cannot perform wholly new studies and analyze them. Mr. De Vrieze describes a protocol in which researchers at 23 different laboratories performed the same standardized experiment and then performed a meta-analysis. The result was very close to zero and settled a long-running debate as to whether self-control can be depleted (as muscles can be fatigued).

As for me, I will accept the results of all meta-analyses that conform to my preconceptions and take the rest with a grain of salt. On second thought, maybe I had better take them all with a grain of salt.

Over the weekend, Matt Young brought to our attention to story about a paper by T. P. Hill that was rejected by two mathematics journals. — I also highly recommend Lior Pachter’s article on this paper. — The implication in the controversy surrounding the rejections of the paper is that the paper is being blackballed because left-wing academics don’t like the possible implications of the paper: that mathematics is male dominated due to biology and evolution. And given the cottage industry of people convinced that academia is censoring research into human cognitive variation and sexual difference, there is a huge echo chamber promoting the idea that a very reasonable paper™ is being squashed by jack-booted thugs.

I’ve read the paper (Sept 2018 version), and I can assure you that it is not a very reasonable paper™. It is a pile of hot garbage. Creationist trade magazines publish articles with more evolutionary content than “A Theory for Gender Differences in Variability”. A paper that proposes “to help explain how one gender [sic] of a species might tend to evolve with greater variability than the other gender [sic]” contains no genes, no alleles, no genetics, and no biology! There is no mention of pleiotropy, heritability, Fisher’s fundamental theorem, or the Price equation, all things which are relevant when talking about how complex traits respond to selection pressure. The formulation of Hill and Tabachnikov’s model is as far away from the models that we use in evolutionary biology as homeopathy is away from evidence-based medicine. It is very clear that the authors are unfamiliar with evolutionary biology and are probably also unfamiliar with cognitive research and biology. This is not a paper that should be celebrated for exploring taboo subjects, but a paper that should be laughed at for its sophomoric premise and execution.

Yes, it is “just” a toy model. However, a model is only a good as the assumptions it makes, and a model not based in biology cannot be used to learn anything about biology. The execution of Hill and Tabachnikov’s model is fundamentally flawed because it lacks any concept of genetics, and without genetics you have no way of concluding that a population will even respond to selection and even less hope of concluding how it will respond. Therefore, the paper’s central conclusion that “selectivity theory would predict a species whose males now generally exhibit more variability than its females” is stated without merit. It’s an extremely bad paper and should not be be published in a peer-reviewed journal in its current form. There are lots of other issues with the paper, but I chose to highlight this one because I’m an evolutionary geneticist.

Toy models are fun, but they have no business being used to understand the variation of human cognition. Sure its fun to play pretend, but this is an academic area with a lot of cultural baggage and potential policy outcomes. Shitty scholarship can do a lot of damage to real people, and Hill and Tabachnikov’s model is a great example of shitty scholarship. Shitty scholarship does nothing to move a scientific field forward, but it can be used to move public policy and public perceptions backwards.

The Panda’s Thumb was founded to counteract the influence of shitty creationist scholarship on public education, and many long-term readers should be well familiar with examples of shitty scholarship that didn’t hurt biology but did hurt biology education.

I encourage our readers to not fall for the seductive narrative that pesky bands of old-white dudes are being deplatformed because they radically refuse to conform to the oppressive norms of academic society. That’s the plot to Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and we know how that turned out.

Photograph by Dan Moore.

Photography Contest, Honorable Mention.