Article on Homosexuality and Neurotransmitters Retracted

I read The Biology of Homosexuality by Jacques Balthazart a few years back.

More recently, I emailed the author complimenting him on the book and asking him a question about one of his conclusions. He confirmed what I asked him about, and sent me an article written by other people about homosexuality and neurotransmitters. He said that some people had mistaken the article to mean that homosexuality was a mental illness, which was not the authors’ intent.

About twenty minutes ago, I was going to read the article, but I couldn’t find the email message with my attachment in my inbox. Gmail recognized the professor’s email address, but there was no email. I must have accidentally deleted it somewhere along the line.

So I just googled to find it. I did, but found out the article was retracted.

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And?

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This was the stated reason:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor in Chief of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews after concerns were raised with respect to the phrasing of comparisons drawn between humans and animal models. These comparisons were deemed unsupportable, and thus in the best interests of publication standards the Editor has concluded it is necessary to retract the paper. The authors disagree with the reason for the retraction.

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you can google the professor’s name and find his email in his university’s faculty page. These are public information.

I already have his email address.

My totally amateur guess would be the inclusion of the word disorders triggered somebody.

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Sorry I was under the impression that you have somehow lost the email. You can surely ask the professor the author’s email address… he will surely know.

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Probably doesn’t comply with the narrative approved by the Twitter hoarde.

The authors email is on the paper. A paper was retracted. Happens more often than people think. Otherwise, I’m not sure what the point of this thread is.

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A bit odd. Concerns were raised about the phrasing, and the comparisons themselves were deemed unsupportable. Early on they say:

Nowadays, useful animal models have helped to frame questions and
to propose hypotheses relevant to human sexual orientation, as
described in Fig. 1.

I guess animal models are off limits unlike all the other areas of biology. We’re not animals after all but some kind of detached postmodern consciousness :slight_smile:

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Me at work

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I don’t see the point of the thread either. The article is still accessible, just with a “retracted” watermark.

The retraction itself does seem odd though. It’s not like any new information not available during peer review and journal acceptance has now come to light. If the editor-in-chief had a political concern about the article, they should have addressed that before acceptance and publication, not after with a unilateral retraction.

Especially if it’s just a phrasing issue - the words are supposed to be those of the authors, not the journal or the journal editor, and the point of academic publication is (or used to be/should be) to present something for open criticism, not necessarily something that’s perfect and undisputed like a textbook.

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Why don’t they just give them a chance to fix the phrasing then? Why didn’t they do it during the peer-review process?

Yes, that’s my point. It’s not clear why they jump from phrasing problems to problems with the comparisons themselves. That doesn’t mean there can’t be a problem with them, but, we’ve seen a lot of studies run aground on purely political shoals recently.

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Was it the editors or the reviewers that had the issue? Usually if the problem is as above, unsupportable, they wont pass the reviewstage because they deem the science to be factually incorrect. That is quite different than a simple phrasing issue that the editors usually would just reword and get you to agree with before publishing.

The article was already published before they retracted it.

Was their emphasis the phrasing or the science being unsupportable?

Does seem they had an issue with the science behind comparing humans to animals. probably not retracted because someone got triggered, but because the science seemed speculative perhaps or the observations between human and animal models could not be confirmed. That’s how it reads to me.

It doesn’t really matter. Those are all things that should have been picked up during peer review if they were an issue, rather than the editor-in-chief unilaterally deciding that the science was “unsupportable” for what appears to be political reasons.

The science doesn’t need to be “correct”, it just needs to pass peer review, which it apparently did.

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Completely agree. That’s why this seems weird. But at the same time many an academic group are often quite poor quality. Happens here nearly all the time. So rather than expecting the academic world to be 100%, it seems more constructive at this stage to not pick the precise reason it was retracted. And it seems to be plausible it was less about woke but about the science. And if so, the authors have a better case (they already disagree publicly with the editors) if they can provide data to support what they called “unsupportable”

If it is a woke type issue, the problem is easily solved and wouldnt need posting on random forums for a brainstorm session. Makes me.thunk there was an error in data that the editor could pick apart easily. Even if it was a triggered response, they cant retract on fairly non consequential phrasing. It would need to attack the data and results.

Unfortunately, regardless of reasons. this just makes the publisher look shitty. peer review should catch all the data. editors should catch all the phrasing. The fact anything gets retracted for such things is rarely worth forgiving. with the exception of new science and new technology etc. Wording is the worst reason to retract/withdraw. Makes the publisher look as professional as they apparently are. Withthe side note that human extremism has no place in raw data and research. which is a problem. Hence the “human separation” thread we had here last year. it’s sad when that happens.

We don’t know, and in all likelihood will never know unless it gets written about.

It’s not necessarily easily solved at all. A lot of people would rather just sweep just things under the rug–it’s safer. Whether it’s posted “on random forums for a brainstorm session” has no impact. It’s just people talking about it, which is what people do on forums.

Mistakes happen and corrections happen. It’s just curious here that the stated reasoning is odd, the author disagrees with it, and it’s a hot button issue. Also in a quick look it seems to have been well-researched–not to say that there can’t be problems. I wouldn’t jump to conclusions, but in the current climate I wouldn’t give the journal the benefit of the doubt either.

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