Who to trust? That is the question when you don’t know very much (all of us). Trust is precious, and to some extent sacred. That’s why I can flip out when I realize after the fact that someone more informed than me in field X sampled biased their argument in a way they knew was shady to support a proposition they were forwarding. What’s the point of that? Who cares if you win at a particular bull-session? You’re burning through cultural capital. And not that most of my interlocutors care, but I’m likely to never trust them again on anything.
In any case, this came to mind when I ran across a James Fallows’ post at The Atlantic. Here’s a screenshot of the appropriate section, with my underlines:
The PNAS link is wrong. The correspondent is actually linking to an article in Quaternary International. And they do point out that there are possible problems with draft quality sequences due to contamination. But I didn’t find the paper too persuasive. There are two issues. First, the Denisova genome is very good quality. So you can be more …