Reply to Skoyles: Misplaced assumptions of perfect human prosociality

Reply to Skoyles: Misplaced assumptions of perfect human prosociality

In his letter (1), the author argues against prosocial tendencies in chimpanzees because the chimpanzees in our study (2) failed to select the prosocial option all of the time. Instead, he suggests that they show evidence for “mean-spirited” motivations, because any deviation from a perfectly prosocial score must indicate purposeful withholding of benefits for the partner. However, behavioral s...

Misplaced Stress on Prosody: A Reply to Black and Byng

Reply to Skoyles: Decline in growth rate, not muscle mass, predicts the human childhood peak in brain metabolism.

In his letter addressing our recent paper (1), Skoyles (2) rightfully notes that growth expenditure is a small fraction of what the brain requires at the ages of slowest human body growth during childhood. We are puzzled by the suggestion that this fact challenges the premise of our interpretation, as this is precisely the observation that motivated our study. The point of our analysis was to e...

Reply to Hilborn: Role of marine reserves depends on assumptions.

We appreciate the points made by Hilborn (1) that changing the assumptions we made could lead to different conclusions. In fact, our overall goal in developing the model in ref. 2 was similar to the goal in developing the model in ref. 3 to indicate how a model with clear assumptions would shed light on the role played by marine protected areas in spatial fishery management. Here we make three ...

Reply to Skottun and Skoyles: Statistical and practical significance of extra-wide letter spacing for dyslexic children

In their letter, Skottun and Skoyles (1) question our conclusion (2) that extra-wide letter spacing is more beneficial to dyslexic children than to normally developing children. Here, we show the pitfalls of their reasoning. First, Skottun and Skoyles (1) mistakenly purport that our conclusion is based on a null effect in the control group (younger normal readers matched for reading level). How...