This obviously depends completely on the field of science that you are in. Epidemiology? Please, that hardly even counts as science. You're basing this on a field that you can't even do experiments in! You just wait for an outbreak to occur (fairly rare) and then see what happens and base all of your conclusions on a few isolated incidents. My advice to Dr. Ioannidis is to pick another field where you can do some concrete science.
It's been known for decades that baker's yeast have the ability to fix mutated sex determining genes via exchange with an intact "cryptic" copy. The mechanism has been worked out in extreme detail. I don't think anyone ever thought they were the only organism that could do this . . .
I guess it's nice to have proof, though.
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This obviously depends completely on the field of science that you are in. Epidemiology? Please, that hardly even counts as science. You're basing this on a field that you can't even do experiments in! You just wait for an outbreak to occur (fairly rare) and then see what happens and base all of your conclusions on a few isolated incidents. My advice to Dr. Ioannidis is to pick another field where you can do some concrete science.
It's been known for decades that baker's yeast have the ability to fix mutated sex determining genes via exchange with an intact "cryptic" copy. The mechanism has been worked out in extreme detail. I don't think anyone ever thought they were the only organism that could do this . . . I guess it's nice to have proof, though.