Thank you for the mini-review!
For a while, I worked at a hospital in the clinical studies department. Every single day, I read study proposals and study results that were utter garbage—often, entire studies were based on gathering patient data and then using high-powered statistics to compare every data element to every other data element within the set. And every time there was a correlation between two data elements, at P < 0.05 significance, the study authors would happily write up a paper for publishing. I wanted to scream—this is not science, and has no business being published as such. A statistical correlation means absolutely nothing if there is not a mechanism linking the two correlated elements.
In my field of biochemistry, it is possible to have very high quality results with small sample sizes. But that’s because everything is controlled, save for the one or two variables under study. If you want to show that a gene is repressed by exposure to a chemical, you only need three samples per treatment group for statistical significance. I could run an entire experiment in a 6-well plate—then repeat the experiment twice, and I would have data suitable for publication.
BTW, I like the way you spelled your moniker with codons in your tagline.
Thanks.