>Miles writes:
>
>>This is wild extrapolation from correlational data!
>
>And this is holiday homophbia as only Miles can serve.
huh? Miles criticized the metholodogy of the study. That's not homophobia.
>Why don't you wait and read the entire article once it is
>published and then critique it. Or is it the season to hate
>as well as mail early?
huh? Brian, this is so confusing. Miles didn't make one comment to suggest he hates anything. He criticized the study's methodology and the reasoning used to make conclusions based on evidence.
>Can you ever not attack something I post about queers?
>>. . . a correlation between drug use during pregnancy and
>sexual orientation of offspring is ludricious evidence for the
>claim that "sexuality is determined in the womb".
>
>Why? Because you say so? You use the same technique as
>reparation therapists: can't argue the data, so you attack the
>approach. Either way, anything to denigrate queers.
This is not about denigrating queers. Miles' comments were about faulty logic -- correlation is not causation. It's a concept you learn in introductory statistics class.
>What is so threatening about queerness being biological?
There's nothing threatening about it. There's nothing threatening about queerness being social, either. There's nothing threatening about queerness being some combination, or about it being biological for some and not for others. Nothing Miles has said indicates that he thinks queerness being biological threatens him--or anything else for that matter.
>>The question the researchers here are dodging: what other
>social, psychological, and cultural factors distinguish the drug moms from
>the nondrug moms?
>
>Since they didn't ask the questions you would have, they must
>be wrong. Maybe all researchers should check with you before
>they do their experiments.
That is what researchers are supposed to do. That is why they went to school for years, so they could study the field and the issues and ask these questions. That they don't seem to have asked them is a big problem. In turn, as part of a community of scholars, Miles (and you and anyone else interested in rigorous scholarship) is supposed to criticize their research. That is why people publish. Academia, scientific research -- the whole enterprise has as its ideal the understanding that knowledge is a collective endeavor. We are fallible. We publish our findings and expose those findings to criticism. The goal is to improve knowledge.
Kelley