I'm not a statistician, but if I read the paper correctly ... there is barely a negative correlation in his 2006 study (if you remove the one significant anamol

I'm not a statistician, but if I read the paper correctly ... there is barely a negative correlation in his 2006 study (if you remove the one significant anamoly). n=18 in his 2002 study and n=16 in 2006. He controlled for age and years of active publishing which may be correlated to consumption. In fact, he conveniently removed the 1st principal component in the 2002 study and not in the 2006 and covered it by an offhand remark of "almost quantitatively identical". If they were almost quantitatively identical why did he remove it from one study and not the other. Oh! Well, earlier in the paper he mentions that the results were only consistant between the two studies when he controlled for age. The median consumption of the 6 bohemians in his 2002 study is 200 litres/per year(!!!) and the remaining 12 Moravians drink 37.5 litres/per year (which is quite the bimodal distribution). The 2006 study were the same people as in 2002 "where available". So n=16 for the entire study. They are all researchers in "avian evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology" in the country with the highest per capita beer consumption rate in the world. Hardly a meaningful dataset in my eyes. Then again, maybe I'm biased in my analysis. Beer drinkers unite!