A plea for scientific integrity: a comment on the honeybee odometer controversy

In a non-peer-reviewed arXiv preprint Laura Luebbert and Lior Pachter made numerous criticisms of the work of Mandyam Srinivasan and colleagues, suggesting that there was evidence of data duplication and data manipulation in their work. These imputations were amplified in a news article and blog post in the journal Science and then made news in the mainstream media in several countries. This media activity took place before journals and institutions had the chance to conduct formal investigations that would have allowed Srinivasan and his colleagues a fair hearing, with input from independent experts. In addition, there was no time for the scientific community to evaluate Luebbert and Pachter's work. In particular, they made some very critical comments based on statistical simulations, where they claimed that R² values reported by Srinivasan and colleagues in six papers were "ridiculously high". In this commentary, I show that their inability to reproduce high R² values was due to major flaws in their simulation models. Luebbert and Pachter have never responded in detail to my criticisms, instead relying on the logical fallacies of argument from authority and ad hominem attacks.