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Notes -
I dug up the actual serious report mentioned:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816303907
It's not the greatest study (surprise, surprise), but not terrible for the field. What gets me is just how warped the Independent and Vice articles are in how they cover it. It's like they saw it and dug through it looking for any one statement or finding that could be twisted into something as ridiculous and inflammatory as possible, ignoring the layers of caveats, dropping mention of findings that contradict their preferred theory, and taking a weak correlation and turning it into a strong causal claim.
Neither link directly to the article, though Vice does to the university press release (which itself commits all the same sins, albeit to a lesser extent). It's a big chain of laundering a somewhat interesting but weak (and contested) correlation into an explosive claim.
The critical mistake here is taking any of this media reporting as reflective of any part of reality, instead of just being fiction written to belittle perceived enemies. The only question is why the media wants to paint having agency as some kind of evil.
Kudos for putting actual effort into finding the original data.
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