WIKIMEDIA, RAMAA commentary published in GENETICS this week (October 15) questions the results of a December 2013 Nature Neuroscience paper about how mice, when conditioned to fear odors, pass on their fears to their pups, as well as to their pups’ offspring, presumably by an epigenetic mechanism. Gregory Francis, the critique’s author and a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, suggests that the original paper’s statistical results are “too good to be true.”
Francis has previously written similar statistical reviews of psychology papers. His reviews are based on the theory that experiments, particularly those with relatively small sample sizes, are likely to produce “unsuccessful” findings, such as results that do not reach statistical significance (a p-value of less than 0.05), at least some of the time, even if the experiments are measuring a real phenomenon. Taking into account the researchers’ reports of the strength of the phenomena they are measuring, known as effect size, Francis calculates the probability that an entire series of experiments will be “successful.” In the case of the Nature Neuroscience study, which also showed changes in neuroanatomy and reduced methylation of the body of an odor receptor gene for the sweet-smelling chemical acetophenone in ...
