Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

"Eugenics" is not simply a synonym for the selective breeding of humans, but for a certain type of selective breeding - one that depends very much on who gets to decide what "good" means in the Greek prefix "eu-".

For example, people do not use the term "eugenics" to describe the unintentional selective breeding of humans who maintain the childhood ability to produce lactase and thus can digest milk as an adult.

The term is also tainted by a long history of proponents and advocates wanting to apply the principles of selective breeding to non-inheritable traits, like "criminals", due to a naive understanding of genetics (eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Objections_to_scienti...).

The phrase "what works for plants and animals" seems to be hiding a lot under the covers, like the number of gene lines killed off because they weren't profitable enough for the people doing the breeding. Even in domesticated plants there is an ongoing debate about decline and extinction of heirloom/landrace varieties, and consequential loss of genetic diversity, in the face of "what works" for industrialized agriculture in short-term/decade time-scales.

The "new eugenics" movement emphasizes how choice should be left to the parents, as an alternative to the history of the state deciding these matters. However, if we really are looking at "what works for plants and animals", we can see that optimizing for an individual doesn't always result in what benefits the group.

For example, you can breed an aggressive chicken, more willing to attack other chickens and take their food. The aggressive chicken will be bigger and heavier than the others, but if they are all that aggressive then they end up fighting each other, to the overall detriment of all.

Some of these options will result in a Prisoner's Dilemma, where if some parents choose trait X for their children than those children benefit (as defined by both the parents and children), but if all parents choose X then things becomes worse (again, as defined by both the parents and children.)

Which leads us back to how politics and ethics are inherently connected to the "eu-"/"good" in the deliberate selective breeding of humans, and not simply "merely" connected.

With multiple people working on a paper, some junior, some senior, tight deadlines, and last minute changes, honest mistakes are certainly possible.

Paper figures are usually hand assembled using Adobe Illustrator or similar, which can be error prone.

For instance, placeholder images might have been added during drafting, and they were not later replaced.

So my assumption is the figures must be vital data filled figures. If they're just diagramatic ones (fig 1 type) that are similar amongst articles from the same group on thr same line of work then it's probably plagiarism by the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law.

> We always have, and probably always will have, an arrogance of the present. It's explained by a tautology - what we think is right, is what we think is right.

I think it's culture + semantics/semiotics. I see it occurring most frequently in the form "What is true, is what we believe (~'consensus') is true" (the word belief is usually not explicit though).

In practice, the word "is" has multiple meanings, one of them being "[It is my opinion that] X is true", and pointing out the presence of the implicit opinion part is culturally unacceptable, depending on the scenario. It's a lack of cultural distinction between the universe and reality, they are typically conflated in this era, in our geographical region. Personally, I think LLM's offer some compelling insight into the process underlying this phenomenon, and I bet this can be proven out.

This is true but a critical difference is that STEM is a lot more falsifiable.

Postmodern deconstruction lends itself to a million interpretations, but biological testing either works or doesn't, and inconclusive generally means it doesn't.