The idea that Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD as stated in the article) studies are biased is both obvious and not necessarily entirely p

The idea that Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD as stated in the article) studies are biased is both obvious and not necessarily entirely problematic. The reasons it's not so bad are 2 fold: 1.) Scientists know this and are aware of the caveats (as the article points out). 2.) It's likely that for many biochemical/physiological/medical questions the variation within a reasonably large sample of such a population (male/female, fit/non-fit, manual labor/office work, vegetarian/meat+potatoes, not to mention countless biochemical processes...) swamps out the variation among larger groups. How many studies fail even with such a homogeneous sample? Tons! My point is biology is messy enough already, that it's likely we've got bigger problems to solve than incorporating different standards of living, continents etc. Now it's true if you want to make broad claims about microbiota, by definition you have to actually sample much more widely than the WEIRDs. But again, if you want to make narrow claims about differences between healthy WEIRDs and non-healthy WEIRDs, maybe not. I'm sure it would help, but that doesn't mean those studies are useless! The technologies enabling this kind of work (chiefly next-gen high throughput DNA/RNA sequencing) are about 10 years old. And they haven't really been in relatively low barrier to entry use for much longer than 3 or 4. We're studying a hugely complex system here, and it's the definition of early days. Bias is important, the article is absolutely correct to point it out, but it's way too early to make any conclusions one way or the other about what is important in the microbiome, or the value of the research to date. The best we can say right now is, "It's probably very important, we don't know how just yet."