Tag: Statistics

Don’t believe everything you read about genes and disease in prestigious journals like Science and Nature, say Marcus Munafò and Jonathan Flint. A lot of it is simply wrong. The discovery of genes for a certain behaviour, for schizophrenia, for happiness, always get good press coverage, usually based on publication in a respected scientific journal such as Science or Nature. But here’s an odd thing. In the years following media coverage of discoveries of a gene for depression, for intelligence, and so on, journals less prestigious than Science or Nature often publish reports that contradict the original claim, some even saying that the findings are quite compatible with chance.