https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00997-4

I agree with the conclusions of this paper, but have
little idea how the authors came to them. They seem
to have surveyed the sizes of all available, relevant
and roughly comparable species at the respective
times, and come up with certain standards.

I'll post something on it shortly -- but arguing from
ordinary commonsense logic.

The authors of the paper have hit upon a great
wheeze -- a way of ensuring that their paper will
have no problem with peer review. They've found
some really recondite maths and claim to have
applied it in their methodology:

" . . . we used the recently introduced “SURFACE” approach that fits a series of evolutionary hypotheses via Ornstein-Uhlenbeck or OU stabilizing selection models to phenotypic species data related via a phylogeny and
retains the hypotheses that best fits the data (seen in the lowest corrected Akaike Information Criterion or AICc score). OU models permit the
realization of Simpson’s adaptive zones by allowing for the placement of selective regimes along different branches of a phylogeny, where species in each regime evolve toward a distinct trait optimum—in this case the
optimal body mass for a given regime. . . "

There are a few paragraphs of mathematical
jargon with some equations.

Not something I know anything about, and I guess
that there are about 20 people in the world who
understand the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck theory (and
a lot more who make the claim).

Maybe it's 200 or 2,000, but none of them are
going to be the PA referees who review papers
like this. But are those latter going to admit their
ignorance? No way! So the authors get a free run!

When you see this kind of thing going on, you can
be certain of one thing. The maths is packed with
error, and hopelessly misapplied. (It's a kind of
"naked emperor's clothes" thing and routine in
every field where degenerate science occurs.)
Only a well-qualified expert will be able to show
the errors; they are rare and usually have no
good reason to get involved.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)