I’m all for analysis of, and challenges to, research studies. If we don’t have that we can’t do science. But I don’t like sneering, knee jerk statements like ourmandave’s Yeah, this seems related to the "raccoons becoming domesticated" bullsht.*

I watched the video ourmandave pointed us to where NessieExplains points out what she says are flaws in the study suggesting raccoons are becoming domesticated:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12983-025-00583-1

The data set and the code used to analyze the data are at https://osf.io/56xcg/overview.

Her criticisms and conclusions may well be correct, but her video is really just her saying her conclusions are correct. She downloaded the data and did her own analysis and points to results in her spreadsheets. It all flies by quite quickly. We have to take her word for it. She also made a snarky comment about this line in the R code:

  # 57% Let’s see what we can do to change that!

But the next lines in the code are:

  # what if we remove those pictures that we had issues measuring?
  # that would be gbifIDs: 4855527033, 4096474261, 2311326414, 4528316516
  # Vector of IDs to exclude - the image quality was too bad after all
  ids_to_exclude <- c(4855527033, 4096474261, 4528316516, 2311326414)

So the authors tell us what weak data they’re removing, but the data is still available if other researchers want to put it back in. They are not hiding anything. We do not have to take their word about their conclusions. If NessieExplains does not publish her criticisms she is asking us to take her word for what she says.

She says in the video that she’s an actual raccoon biologist. According to her web site she is pursuing a master’s in biology (nessieexplains.com/about-nessie-explains/) although there is no date on the page, so she may have completed the degree already.

As I say, she may well be correct, but I have no way of knowing.