Slate, science, and Brian Palmer

I'm still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It's of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason Collins, Daniel MacArthur, and Alex Tabarrok. The comments at Slate were rather scathing too. I observed over at Genomes Unzipped that many of the assertions in the piece were in the "not even wrong/what does that even mean?" class. Palmer is apparently a freelancer at Slate, and they're doing a bunch of stories on twins this week. I wonder if they just sent him the assignment with instructions on the slant, and he took it a little too far. Even if it was a polemic it was a shoddy and embarrassing one. My main concern is that many people perceive Slate to be an organ which publishes "smart" and well researched ...