Find and evaluate a popular source that makes a causal claim about genetics.

Find a recent popular source that references a scholarly source to make a causal claim about genetics.

The popular source does not have to be about humans and/or behavior.

  1. Report the APA-formatted citation to the popular source.

  2. Identify a CAUSAL CLAIM made by the popular source. Provide the causal claim, either as a quote (if it’s short and clear) or by summarizing the causal claim in your own words.

  3. Provide the APA-formatted citation to the scholarly source that the popular source references to support the claim.

  4. Provide an evaluation of whether the causal claim is appropriate (rather than, say, not being able to establish causation beyond correlation). As part of your evaluation:

    a. Briefly (1-2 sentences) describe the relevant information to summarize how the scholarly source set up the investigation of its question. Relevant information will most likely include participant characteristics (such as species, number, demographics) and the method (such as phenotype operationalization and experimental or data analysis method - see Table 1 in the Briley et al. 2018 reading from this week for a list of likely methods in human BG studies).

    b. Describe whether the authors of the scholarly source themselves made a causal claim, supported either by a quote from the scholarly source (if it’s short and clear) or by summarizing their causal claim in your own words.

    c. Your own brief evaluation (1-2 sentences) of whether the popular source’s causal claim was appropriate, based on both:

     i. Whether the popular source's causal claim (in point 2) matches the claims of the authors of the scholarly source (in point 4b); and

 ii. Whether the methods applied are appropriate and why, including at least one citation. You may either refer to material from the course to support the "why", or to outside materials/references, especially if there's a method applied that we haven't covered (Wikipedia articles and similar are acceptable/useful citations for this part).

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