Over at his website, Lost in Transcription, Jon Wilkins (a professor at the Santa Fe Institute who works on theoretical population biology) has posted on the big kin selection kerfuffle in a piece called “Nowak versus the world.” Wilkins, apparently, is with the “world”:
I’ll just say that I am not really sure what the authors of the original article were hoping to accomplish. From my read, the article seems to reveal a rather disturbing lack of familiarity with a huge body of scientific literature from the past few decades. Either that, or it represents a rather disturbingly disingenuous attempt to misrepresent that huge body of scientific literature. I’m sure that there are other possible explanations, but I’m not coming up with them off the top of my head.
I also don’t know what the editors at Nature were thinking when they published this paper. Or, rather, I have some personal theories as to what they were thinking, which I am afraid do not reflect well on their competence, professionalism, or honesty.
I love it when Hello Bear compares Nowak et al.’s attitude toward kin selection with Bill O’Reilly’s toward the tides.
Rather than explain the fracas in detail, Wilkins created this LOLzy cartoon in which a pompous top-hatted bear, representing the Harvard team of Nowak et al., gets pwned by a female bear resembling Hello Kitty, but with a mouth!:
That’s one clever kitty.
or bear
I love the description of the peer review process of the paper by those important Harvard scientists.
There is a lot of value in the important Harvard science done by those important Harvard scientists.
Very good!
I would certainly be interested in how scientists feel about the whole process of peer review & submitting scientific articles. There was a discussion of this in 2008 in Science –
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5885/15.full
The response by Robert Cone is interesting. He says, “reviewers tend to provide a negative review if (a) the manuscript presents a controversial topic, (b) the manuscript disagrees with the reviewer’s own work or (c) the manuscript supports the reviewer’s work but the reviewer seeks sole proprietorship.” I am not for a moment suggesting that happened here, but maybe they wanted to stir things up to gerenate publicity? Nature’s office is just near where I work & I have spotted one of the editors on the street –
http://www.nature.com/nature/about/editors/index.html
If I ever see him again I will ask him!
‘gerenate’- a neologism = Generate publicity.
I’ve met one of the 3 reviewers of the Nowak et al. paper. That reviewer is also among the et al. of the Abbot et al. paper. He wrote a very negative report about the manuscript, but it got accepted anyway. Usually at Nature, one negative review out of 3 will kill a manuscript’s chances of getting accepted, but not this time for some reason.
That’s very interesting.
What could that ‘some reason’ be in this case? It’s a real puzzler.
Gee, I don’t have a clue. But a little nepotism and corruption is not entirely unheard of at the editorial offices of Nature. I know another guy (also one of “the >150” as it happens) who got his paper accepted by Nature after initial rejection, thanks to a phone call by a Cambridge don to the editors (the don being his old PhD adviser with many Nature papers under his belt).
Funny – the editor I saw was Henry Gee…
Nice job. I think this whole affair demonstrates that there are “important Harvard scientists” who fail to comprehend the inevitable algorithm that is genic-level selection operating in kin groups.
Horrifically off-base but controversial papers from prestigious institutions (thus warranting extensive and ongoing) refutation GET CITED A LOT.
End of story.
Argh… parenthesis in the wrong place.
Should be mandatory viewing in Biology 101 under a heading such as, “How Not to do Science”!
But why, why, she whined, did the important scientists doing important science at the important university write the original paper in the first place? What makes them challenge what I think I’ve determined are a lot of established science and scientists, going back decades? Their paper may not be good, but these scientists became important scientists because they’ve truly done important science. Why’ve they gone so far off-track?
God?
xxo
The rewards and attention received by being the ones to “overturn” established science is so high that it is irresistible for some scientists. This incidentally is the best argument of why there is no evolution conspiracy — there is a huge incentive to break the conspiracy. In this case, Nowak et al. happen to be wrong, but it demonstrates the incentive well.
“But more than 150 people representing some of the biggest names in population genetics and social and behavioral evolution have written to criticize the paper.”
Whoa — sounds like the paper must have really struck a nerve!
/snark
Yeah, and just wait, we’ll get a “they laughed at Galileo, too” eventually.
Sagan!