Lines of thought suggested by the basic sciences may not have been pursued because of political considerations.

Progress is likely to be erratic with a socially defensive peer review system that accepts statements of intent as evidence of unbiased observations: “The observers were masked.”, not: “The observers were shown to have been masked, p<0.05.”

In a pairwise comparison of old world monkeys, new world monkeys, and humans, one of the researchers’ intentions was to block information transfer between pairs, but they did not test to see if their intended blocks were successful.

“Navigation in human crowds; testing the many-wrongs principle” makes it difficult to reconcile the conclusion in the abstract of significant differences in navigational accuracy between group sizes only when individuals had a directional uncertainty of 112.5°, with the description in the text of significant differences in navigational accuracy between group sizes when individuals had a directional uncertainty of 67.5°. Many wrongs?

In a study of lizards, “Significance level was set at p=0.05”, but were there one or two tails? There were rather a lot of statistical tests, so that it would not have been surprising if, at p=0.05, some of them had been significant by chance.

In “The spread of attention across modalities and space in a multisensory object”, subjects detected significantly more visual targets when those targets were accompanied by an auditory stimulus than when they were presented alone, but the statistical tests were one-tailed, meaning that the researchers did not test for the obvious possibility of detection of less visual targets when they were accompanied by an auditory stimulus, because attention was divided: whyever not?

In 2005, the isotropic fractionator was claimed to be a simple, rapid method for the quantification of total cell and neurone numbers in the brain, followed in 2006 and 2007 by comparative studies of rodents and primates, and a conclusion that primate brains have a larger number of neurones than rodent brains of similar size, presumably endowing them with greater computational power and cognitive abilities. However, these cognitive abilities did not include the need to show that said isotropic fractionator produced the same results for a given collection of cells when used by different human primates, and when used by the same human primate at different times.

The association between ‘pyow-hack’ calls and movement is weakened if movement is associated with other calls. In “Semantic combinations in primate calls”, the researchers were able to ‘relocate’ 17 groups of putty-nosed monkeys that had been exposed to recordings of ‘hack’ calls. The amount of movement entailed in the relocations was not reported.

In “Lithium in the prevention of suicide in mood disorders: updated systematic review and meta-analysis”, two researchers (AC, JRG or KH) independently identified all randomised trials…Hey! Is that not three researchers? No response to an email inviting discussion of inter-rater reliability.