Slate, science, and Brian Palmer

I'm still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It's of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason Collins, Daniel MacArthur, and Alex Tabarrok. The comments at Slate were rather scathing too. I observed over at Genomes Unzipped that many of the assertions in the piece were in the "not even wrong/what does that even mean?" class. Palmer is apparently a freelancer at Slate, and they're doing a bunch of stories on twins this week. I wonder if they just sent him the assignment with instructions on the slant, and he took it a little too far. Even if it was a polemic it was a shoddy and embarrassing one. My main concern is that many people perceive Slate to be an organ which publishes "smart" and well researched pieces, and they'll take Palmer's screed at face value. The scientific problems with the article are legion. But still: how does something like this get published in a relatively high-end publication? Brian Palmer has editors presumably. If the copy was an undergraduate paper the prose would be relatively polished, but the overall structure of the argument and the nakedguilt by association are marks of hurried sloppiness. The attempt to smear twin studies by association with Francis Galton was pathetic and childish. What next, turn against the concept of statistical correlation because Galton introduced it? There has to be more to this story than what we know. Or perhaps the people at Slate just don't know anything about science.