Michael Woodley of Menie

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses.

The “erasing race” effect is the reduction of the salience of “race” as an alliance cue when recalling coalition membership, once more accurate information about coalition structure is presented. We conducted a random-effects model meta-analysis of this effect using five United States studies (containing nine independent effect sizes). The effect was found (ρ = 0.137, K = 9, 95% CI = 0.085 to 0.188). However, no decline effect or moderation effects were found (a “decline effect” in this context would be a decrease in the effect size over time). Furthermore, we found little evidence of publication bias. Synthetically correcting the effect size for bias stemming from the use of an older method for calculating error base rates reduced the magnitude of the effect, but the it remained significant. Taken together, these findings indicate that the “erasing race” effect generalizes quite well across experimental contexts and would, therefore, appear to be quite robust. We reinterpret the theoretical basis for these effects in line with Brunswikian evolutionary-developmental theory and present a series of predictions to guide future research in this area.

The Continuous Parameter Estimation Model is applied to develop individual genomic-level heritabilities for the latent hierarchical structure and developmental dynamics of Life History (LH) strategy LH strategies relate to the allocations of bioenergetic resources into different domains of fitness. LH has moderate to high population-level heritability in humans, both at the level of the high-order Super-K Factor and the lower-order factors, the K-Factor, Covitality Factor, and General Factor of Personality (GFP). Several important questions remain unexplored. We developed measures of genome-level heritabilities employing an American sample of 316 monozygotic (MZ) and 274 dizygotic (DZ) twin dyads and a Swedish sample of 863 MZ and 475 DZ twin dyads. This novel heritability index measures individual genetic transmissibility, therefore opening new avenues for analyzing complex interactions among heritable traits inaccessible to standard structural equations methods. For these samples: (1) moderate to high heritability of factor loadings of Super-K on its lower-order factors is demonstrated, evidencing biological preparedness, genetic accommodation, and the gene-culture coevolution of biased epigenetic rules of development; (2) moderate to high heritability of the magnitudes of the effect of the higher-order factors upon their loadings on their constituent factors, evidencing genetic constraints upon phenotypic plasticity; and (3) that heritability of the LH factors, of factor loadings, and of the magnitudes of the correlations among factors are weaker among those with slower LH speeds, demonstrating that inter-individual variation in transmissibility is a function of individual socioecological selection pressures.

There are indications that simple reaction time might have slowed in Western countries, based on both cohort- and multi-study comparisons. A possible limitation of the latter method in particular is measurement error stemming from methods variance, which results from the fact that instruments and experimental conditions change over time and between studies. We therefore set out to measure the simple auditory reaction time (SRT) of 7,081 individuals (2,997 males and 4,084 females) born in Sweden 1959-1985 (subjects were aged between 27 and 54 years at time of measurement). Depending on cut-offs and adjustment for ageing related slowing on SRT, the data suggest that SRT has increased between 3 and 16 ms in the 27 birth years covered in the present sample. The slowing is unlikely to be explained by attrition, as evaluated by comparing the general intelligence × birth-year interactions and standard deviations for both male participants and dropouts, utilizing military conscript cognitive ability data. The present result is consistent with previous studies employing alternative methods, and may result from several synergistic factors, such as possible recent micro-evolutionary trends favouring lower g in Sweden and the effects of industrially produced neurotoxic substances on peripheral nerve conduction velocity.

In their response to our recent article (Woodley et al., 2011), Bousfield and LeBlond (2011) argue on the basis of purported morphological and behavioral differences that the case for Hagelund's juvenile 'Cadborosaurus' being a pipefish is weakened into triviality. We note several major problems with their response and feel that their dismissive tone indicates a biased and unscientific approach to the investigation of this subject. Firstly, note that Bousfield and LeBlond (2011) thought that, by attempting to dismiss our pipefish identification, they had completed their task of critiquing our paper. While their 'critique' is grossly inadequate in any case, note that they made no mention of the assorted additional fish taxa also found by us (Woodley et al., 2011) to be more similar to the Hagelund specimen than the specimen was to their 'Cadborosaurus' construct.

Eyewitness reports and cultural representations have been interpreted by some researchers to suggest the existence of a large, long-bodied marine vertebrate in the northeast Pacific. Dubbed “Caddy” or “Cadborosaurus” (after Cadboro Bay, British Columbia), it was formally named and described as Cadborosaurus willsi by Bousfield and LeBlond in 1995. Among the supposedly most informative accounts is the alleged 1968 capture of a juvenile by William Hagelund, detailed in his 1987 book Whalers No More. Reportedly morphologically similar to adult “Cadborosaurs,” the specimen was comparatively tiny, and apparently precocial. Bousfield and LeBlond argue that this strongly supports their contention that “Caddy” is reptilian (juvenile reptiles are typically precocial, recalling “miniature adults” in both behavior and morphology). Anomalous traits suggest some degree of misrecollection in Hagelund’s account, furthermore a quantitative analysis of the similarity of 14 candidate identities with the specimen indicates that it most strongly resembles the bay pipefish (Syngnathus leptorhynchus)—far more so than a cryptid or reptile. While this detracts from the plausibility of the cryptid, the re-identification of this particular specimen does not discount the data as a whole nor does it suggest that all “Caddy” reports are necessarily of known fish. We contend that the “reptilian hypothesis” does, however, need to be seriously re-examined in light of the removal of a strong piece of evidence. Keywords: bay pipefish—Syngnathus leptorhynchus—sturgeon poacher—Podothecus accipenserinus—Cryptozoology—Cadborosaurus willsi—reptile—William Hagelund.