Upholding "good science" in human origins research: A response to Chan et al (2019)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent publication by Chan et al (2019) entitled “Human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations” fails to meet scientific standards for publication in two ways. First, it neglects its scientific duty to discuss the entire body of scientific evidence around human origins, which leads to unsupportable claims. Second, it reinforces racialized power dynamics within the science of human origins. We argue that the authors would have benefitted from a more diverse team that included social scientists and humanists, and that the editorial process failed to uphold thorough and morally responsible science.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.145 | 0.376 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.033 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.118 | 0.115 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".