This is a story I thought that Data Scientists would appreciate, despite being predominately skewed to the biological sciences.
Quick background: Males of Drosophila melanogaster (Fruit Fly) 'sing' to their mates by vibrating their wings.
In 1980, researchers identified rhythms in the 'wing songs' that could be related back to particular alleles.
Kyriacou, C.P. & Hall, J.C., 1980. Circadian rhythm mutations in
Drosophila melanogaster affect short-term fluctuations in the
male’s courtship song. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 77(11), pp.6729–6733.
The paper and its research findings enter scientific legend and are reiterated and cited over and over, despite only a few being able to reproduce their results.
Recent work has verified that the rhythms reported were actually artifacts of the way the data was analyzed.
Stern, D.L., 2014. Reported Drosophila courtship song rhythms are
artifacts of data analysis. BMC Biology, 12(1), p.38.
A cautionary tail or a case for the release of raw data so everyone can draw their own conclusions?
NOTE: This was an email posted to the school-of-data mailing list
school-of-data@lists.okfn.org
https://lists.okfn.org/mailman
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