Data mining: tonal languages and genes edition
2007-06-04 · Original WordPress address
Bob Ladd and Dan Dediu found a correlation between geographical dispersion of certain genes and geographical dispersion of tonal languages.
There's a great discussion of their method at Language Log and Mr. Ladd responds.
The bottom line is Bob and Dan found a correlation not causation (like the headlines are suggesting) and correlation can be spurious. As Bob says in his follow-up, data mining is good for "hypothesis-generating rather than hypothesis-testing." Their next step is to go into the lab and do experiments.
I wish we had that option in Economics (or I wished we used that option more often).