It could instead have something to do with the credibility of the researcher he cited. Technically speaking there’s nothing wrong with the editor of a premier surgical journal citing the work of an evolutionary psychologist who’s other work includes assessing coed breast size for evolutionary advantage, whether homosexuality is evolved, and whether your tone of voice is evolved to signal your fertility. And so there’s technically nothing wrong with citing his work on the anti-depressant qualities of hawt bareback sex on… once again… 293 college coeds. (The researcher, Gordan Gallup, remains oddly silent on whether the ingredients in semen ward off depression in, oh, say, gay men. Even though more conventional applications of all the named active ingredients allegedly found in semen work pretty much identically in both men and women.)

But I digress. Whereas there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a serious physician citing a social scientist’s speculation from nine years ago on the alleged pharmacological effects of body fluids, other physicians… might be inclined to quibble when a number of other, larger, less agenda-driven studies of less homogenous groups of women fail to corroborate those speculations.

Just because readers of the Wall Street Journal enjoy reading editorials that engage in wish fulfillment and cherry picking of data doesn’t mean readers of Surgery News are similarly inclined.

But then just because WSJ readers are notoriously humorless is no reason to imagine American surgeons have none. But the humor should probably rely on something besides rehashes of disputed research. No matter how much one imagines one’s readers might wish it were true.

figleaf