I'm afraid he doesn?t uncover any truth and it must have been a very quiet week if this is all he had to pick on. The study does sound rather ridiculous but the fact remains that girls do like pink and boys like blue. The study to find out why is not invalid. The problems he discovered with the methodology are no more than we discovered ourselves studying and examining this stuff in the LSE, in the Darwin at LSE department earlier this year. Like he himself said, the problem was mostly in the translation via the media ?This week every single newspaper in the world lapped up the story that scientists have cracked the pink problem. ?At last, science discovers why blue is for boys but girls really do prefer pink? said the Times. And so on.? Talk about bad science. I am usually a fan of BG, but this was such a straw man, it was scaring crows away in my garden.
?the evidence for genetic influence on behaviour, emotion, and cognition, is coarse;? he says revealing he actually knows little of evolutionry sceince at all ? evolutionary sceince is the study of genes within environments, there is no either or. It is all culture and biology ? neither one nor the other. This is basic, evolutioney theory for dummies stuff.
The whole 'just so' argument is only proffered by people who don't understand evolutionary science ? it is straight out of (cut and paste at your peril) Steven ?s anti-adaptionist rhetoric, that has itself been discredited long ago.
It would be a mistake to take the failings of this one study to mean that all evolutionary science is 'bad science'. It most certainly does not rely on ?an internal, circular logic? and it is vigorously questioned and tested as all other scientific hypothesis are. And that is all it is, a hypothesis ? as Goldacre made clear in his writing but which he didn?t feel the need to draw attention to, as it may have had the affect of detracting from his pseudo argument..read the article carefully. There is a caveat that makes the whole piece invalid and that is the (honest) inclusion of the word ?may?...
?This, the authors speculated (to international excitement and approval) may be because men go out hunting, but women need to be good at interpreting flushed emotional faces, and identifying berries whilst out gathering.
So the study says may and the media interprets this hypothesis as "At last, science discovers why blue is for boys but girls really do prefer pink"
A little too much schadenfreude from Ben I think. I usually like the column, but this was very lazy.