[nis0s]

The claims are poorly substantiated, it’s not enough to make assumptions about something and read about it. You must directly validate a claim by rigorously defining the traits in question, and then find some way to perform measurements—indirect evidence isn’t appropriate to make statements about psychological and personality similarities.

Note that genetic testing or evidence will be insufficient for proving the type of claim this paper is making because there are too many confounding factors which override biological similarities—that’s the whole issue with nature vs. nurture.

[jhanschoo]

> The claims are poorly substantiated, it’s not enough to make assumptions about something and read about it.

Can you provide a concrete example from the paper?

[nis0s]

> Testing this hypothesis requires (a) understanding human psychosocial adaptations to arctic environments, (b) showing that East Asians and Inuit possess these traits, and (c) making the case that the existence of these traits in modern East Asians is primarily the result of natural selection and/or gene–culture coevolution having acted in the Late Pleistocene on East Asians’ ancestors rather than other factors.

That’s the main part of the paper, and what follows is essentially a literature review, which is an inherently flawed way to prove a hypothesis.

A hypothesis is a testable claim, which can be independently verified if it is validated. There is no process in the paper, other than a review of other literature, to substantiate the paper’s new claims. So, this person is essentially doing science journalism, not science.

I think the two main problems are that they didn’t provide sufficient work for (b) or (c), but they’re laboring under the misconception that a background review of literature is enough. But instead a background review is used to justify the structure of measurements and analysis which usually follows in scientific papers. So, the claim is poorly substantiated.