Seeing an informed rebuttle like this always reminds me of the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect as illustrated by Michael Crichton:<p>"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. . . In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
I have not read through the whole article yet, but it seems strange and it is unfortunate that this Harvard published request for corrections has no links at the start to the paper in question[1], the nytimes article[2], or David Reich's response he sent to the nytimes[3]. Here are some links.<p>[1]Skoglund et al. (2016) paper "Genomic insights into the peopling of the Southwest Pacific.", doi: 10.1038/nature19844, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27698418" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27698418</a><p>[2]"Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps?", <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-paleogenomics.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-pale...</a><p>[3]Never printed by the nytimes, but it would have been nice if he had linked to a personal copy.
In person, David Reich is an extremely thoughtful and kind guy. I have no reason to doubt his version of events. Population genetics is a remarkably subtle field, and it's not surprising that a journalist would understand it 95% correctly, with the missing 5% being devastating for their article.
Does the US not have a Press Complaint Authority? In Denmark, we have Pressenævnet[0] which handles complaints against media outlets.<p>If an article is found to be at fault, the publishing outlet will be required to publish a retraction/correction/apology, depending on the offence. During the review, the outlet can make their case against the complaint.<p>Does the US not have something similar? Because these complaints sound like the perfect fit for something like this.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.pressenaevnet.dk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pressenaevnet.dk/</a>
I don’t understand that people are still surprised that articles, particularly about complex issues, mess things up or gets facts wrong. I think a journalist context switches a lot (even in the same field) and it’s hard to get everything right. I don’t read news as facts, more like indications that something have happened and if it’s sounds interesting I do some reasearch about it or check reports or follow numbers on my own. I never assume that news reporters gets the whole story. It perplexes me when people scream “fake news” or something. “Fake news” doesn’t exist because the opposite doesn’t either. When we talk about news, Plato got it right.
This seems to be in reply to: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-paleogenomics.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-pale...</a>
Edit: I was looking at a corrected article. Ignore this post.<p>I don't know a whole lot about this, but I do know that if you write something to show that you were misrepresented in an article you need to be extremely careful to not misrepresent the article.<p>He says:<p>>The article wrongly states that in 2015 my colleagues I argued that the population of Europe was “almost entirely” replaced by people from the Eastern Europe Steppe<p>When the article says:<p>>Almost entirely replaced existing commmunities [snip] in Central and Northern Europe.
The article's title says "New York Times", but the article itself says "New York Times Magazine". They're completely different publications...