My education has equipped me quite adequately to fend off such critiques, and frankly I think it's a misuse of terminology to claim that studies "prove" anythin

My education has equipped me quite adequately to fend off such critiques, and frankly I think it's a misuse of terminology to claim that studies "prove" anything, because the nature of empirical evidence even under the most generous assumptions is that a body of evidence can support or contradict conclusions, but "proof" as a concept comes from logical modes of inference, which only work within contexts where the conclusions drawn pertain to assumptions that are defined in a stricter sense than any of these fuzzy real-world questions permit