[jszymborski]

I think the important things to know here are:

1. A group of scientist have submitted a manuscript for review with a number of exceptionally (and uncharacteristically) bold claims.

2. A huge amount of scrutiny and additional reproducibility will necessarily need to be conducted before conclusions of this nature can be drawn.

3. This manuscript hasn't even passed the normal muster... a biorxiv post isn't much different than a Medium post. Claims like these require many eyes.

EDIT: My sentiment echoed by someone who know more than I https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1223325141364592640?s=...

[cs702]

As regards #3, I agree: the more eyes who see this unconfirmed claim, the better. That's the main reason I upvoted the OP.

A great outcome would be if reputable scientists see this on HN or Twitter or learn about it through colleagues, and subsequently refute it or dismiss it as bad science.

[im3w1l]

> the more eyes who see this unconfirmed claim, the better.

Isn't it a waste of those eyes' time if it turns out to be false? When there are plenty of confirmed things they could be reading?

[folli]

#2: replicating their BLAST search is easy: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=398N4CS... and it shows that the matches of these short inserts are completely by chance and don't constitute any statistically significant relationship.

[cs702]

Thank you for posting this here -- and thank you for taking a quick look at that paper and debunking it.

I just upvoted your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22206393.