Cherry-picking evidence and why peer review matters
Dr Helen Webberley on Heretics: the gender debate, with Andrew Gold, Heretics
If a report cites medical studies, it must be telling the truth about what those studies say. Science is science: the papers are there, anyone can read them, and a review that pulls them together is just summarising the facts.
What I was pointing to there is one of the oldest problems in medicine, and it has nothing to do with gender specifically. You can find a paper to support almost any conclusion if you go looking for one. The question is never just "are there studies?" but "who chose which studies counted, and did anyone independent check their working?" That is what peer review exists to do: it takes the conclusions out of the hands of the people who reached them and puts them in front of a separate group who have no stake in the answer. A review that skips that step, or that is assembled by people with a predetermined destination in mind, is not evidence. It is a bibliography arranged to look like one.
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