| > You can make meaningful statistical claims about this with just two subjects With just two subjects, there is a very high chance that the results of your testing are overly specific to those two subjects, and do not hold for most of the population. With only 8 subjects, as in this study, that is still very true. For example, people like the one person the mosquitos were extremely attracted to could be one in 10, one in 100 or one in a million. In the latter case, the findings are much, much less meaningful. That's true even for the findings about specific genes affecting attraction. What if that one person is an extreme outlier and the mechanism causing the results isn't relevant for 99.9999% of the human population? > Can you elaborate on which specific statistical claim you think they should not make? For example, the claim that "Highly attractive people have higher levels of carboxylic acids on their skin" does not seem to be well enough backed by evidence in this case. If they wrote, "the one/three attractive people we tested had higher levels of carboxylic acids on their skin", I'd have no complaints. |
I might be missing something, but do you not see additional evidence for this claim in the discussion around figure S4?
In my reading, the authors do go out of their way to point out that carboxylic acid presence is only one of possibly many more factors. (See also "Limitations of the study"). Most of that nuance is lost in the "highlights" section though, I would agree.