Twitter is good for some stuff, and the best are 1.) cat and duck pictures and 2.) finding out about new science papers, often before they’re published. Remember the conflict last year about the frequency of women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies (see my posts here). The original paper in PLoS One by Anderson et al. claimed that not only did women engage in hunting in these societies more often than we thought (79% of a sample of such societies showed women participated in hunting), but they also hunted big game more often than we thought. The paper was meant to dispel “The myth of man the hunter” (part of its title) and was clearly meant to promulgate some kind of sex equity in hunting, though a separation of gender roles doesn’t demean women.
The paper was criticized a lot for using biased data (see the set of links above), and the bias, it seemed, either intentionally or fortuitously dispelled what was seen as a misogynistic view: men hunted and women stayed home to grow food, mend things, and take care of the children. It was certainly treated in the popular literature as a blow to both misogyny and the view that sexes had “roles” consistent across societies.
Then I saw this tweet by Alexander, who does cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and it pointed to a not-yet-published paper on BiorΧiv whose claims, when you read it blow Anderson et al. out of the water. Now remember, it isn’t yet peer-reviewed, but its accusations—there are 15 authors—are devastating. If it’s true, Anderson et al. are guilty of incredibly sloppy scholarship. And also perhaps ideologically-biased scholarship, since every error or miscoding they used biased the results in favor or women hunting more frequently or taking larger game.
First, the tweet.
Click below to see the pdf of the paper:
Venkataraman et al. find that the paper commits every error that it was possible to make in the paper: leaving out important papers, including irrelevant papers, using duplicate papers, mis-coding their societies, getting the wrong values for “big” versus “small” game, and many others.
Rather than go through the mistakes, I’m just going to show you the last three paragraphs of Venkataraman et al., which summarize the errors they found in Anderson et al. Read it. If they’re even close to being right, PLoS ONE should retract the Anderson et al. paper.
We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with Anderson et al.’s (2023) analysis. Specifically, Anderson et al.’s (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from DPLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.
Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our re-coding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) societies in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our re-coding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., [10]), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.
The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups. Anthropologists have long recognized that the nature of cooperation in foragers is complex and multi-faceted, and women’s and men’s subsistence activities play important and often complementary roles. Moreover, women’s hunting has been studied for decades, and anthropologists have a good understanding of when and why it occurs. Yet, to focus on hunting at the expense of other critical activities – from gathering and food processing, to water and firewood collection, to the manufacture of clothing, shelters, and tools, to pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, childcare, and healthcare, to education, marriages, rituals, politics, and conflict resolution – is to downplay the complexity, and thereby the importance of women’s roles in the foraging lifeway. To build a more complete picture of the lives of foragers in the present and the past, it serves no one to misrepresent reality. In correcting the misapprehension that women do not hunt, we should not replace one myth with another
The truth is the truth, and, as Venkataraman et al. note repeatedly, the truth does not work to the detriment of women in these societies, who, with a frequent division of labor, work at least as hard as do the men.
h/t: cesar
It will be interesting to see if and how the authors of the original paper address these criticisms. I also wonder if the media will be as interested in covering this rebuttal.
What do you think the answer to your second point is? I bet the rebuttal gets NO press. Of course it has to be published first, but I bet it will be; it’s minutely documented.
I won’t take that bet.
Sorry, Sastra – which one? That it will get no press or that it will be published? I’m guessing the second one…
It will get no press.
Jumping the gun.
If Anderson et.al. need to make stuff up, bend it to suit, miss stuff and leave some out by my ‘scholarly interpretation’ makes them liars for a cause… whatever that may be.
If so, incredulous and disappointing.
The last 3 paragraphs of the post ‘save the day!’
I too wish to hear their explaination for misinformation and science dissing.
But Laingholm don’t you see that theirs are noble lies?
Huuge difference!
If Claudine Gay can lose her position at Harvard and still retain her 900 k salary, certainly these people can do the same, as victims of sexism.
Karl, have you looked at the authors of the criticized paper?:
Abigail Anderson, Sophia Chilczuk, Kaylie Nelson, Roxanne Ruther, Cara Wall-Scheffler.
They seem to be all women! Do you really believe that, if a paper authored by 5 older white males was riddled with so many errors (miraculously almost all in the direction of the favored hypothesis), anyone would criticize it? If you do, then I have a bridge to sell to you! I dare say the paper would earn a prize – because of patriarchy.
This is all very clear to me: the authors are criticized just because they are women! Look what happened to Claudine Gay, Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos), Hilary Clinton, Greta Gerwig (director and writer of the movie Barbie, and not nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for said movie), Kamala Harris (US vice president with approval ratings worse than Biden’s), Diane Feinstein (US senator of whom people dared to say that she was too old and too ill to continue to be in office), etc. The misogyny of it all!
I checked the faculty pages of the Department of Biology, Seattle Pacific University and the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle (given as home institutions of the 5 authors).
Only Cara Wall-Scheffler is a professor in one of the 2 departments. The other 4 authors are probably undergraduate or graduate students or post-docs.
I couldn’t check where exactly on the intersectional oppression hierarchy the authors are located. I mean Cara Wall-Scheffler is white, but she could be queer, could have problems opening jars, and other disadvantages. So let’s hold back with the criticism. You don’t want to inadvertently punch down, do you?
Agreed. I think we are both in parody mode here.
I think readers may be familiar with the young writer Rob Henderson who has just published a best seller in which includes his recounting about his extraordinary difficult childhood, the book is called “Troubled”.
Dr. Henderson has posted this comment about an article in hapless Scientific American about bonobos and a new term for ya, “mom shaming”:
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1762253650309661047
The maxim that ‘a lie can travel round the world while the truth is putting on its boots’ applies to the conclusions of the original paper.
I wonder if it also illustrates the societal bias that men and women react more positively to female favouring research.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijop.13101
Ugh. The peer review process is imperfect, so the original Andersen et al. paper got into the literature. Predictably, the press ate it up. Now a rejoinder is available—which is how science works—but the press will probably not notice (or will pretend). The editors of PLoS One, or the authors themselves, will need to set the record straight, and it will be up to others to judge whether Andersen et al. succumbed to bad methodology or to bad faith.
Yikes! The second sentence of Venkataraman et al.’s Introduction reads as though small children are a reliable food source – unless it’s just me?
Just finished reading the rebuttal paper – I’m no expert, but it looks pretty solid to me. It will be interesting to see how Andersen et al. respond to it.
Yet another example of “science” shooting itself in the foot. Many facets of the discipline seem to me to be as based on faith/ideology as religion.
And when the science “way of knowing” is as bad I don’t really see much difference between it and “indigenous ways of knowing”.
The original paper/its authors appear to have purposefully deceived. I cannot see how the errors made could have been genuine mistakes.
And I’m pretty sure I just saw Scientific American (I know, I know) re-highlighting their issue containing reporting on this paper as being their most read of 2023? Again, another disgrace. I hope plenty of people are letting Helmuth know, fat lot of good it’ll likely do mind.
How could the original authors have thought they would get away with it? Or did they simply know there’d be no repercussions and any rebuttal quiet?
I’m heartened that so many anthropologists wanted to contribute to this paper, since it suggests that there is still a segment of the profession that is more committed to science and truth than to ideology and social engineering.