You are incorrect in your presumption about what I meant to say. I said exactly what I meant.

You did not express an opinion. You made a claim about what Professor Chen's work had shown. Your claim was incorrect, and I said so. I even explained why your claim was incorrect. You are free to tell me what precisely about my reasoning there was wrong.

Re your second point: there is a third possibility: The statistical analysis in the paper may be right and yet the conclusion of "something going on" may still be invalid. For example, the variables between which a statistical correlation has been found may be meaningless, or may be subject to definitional contestation (as I demonstrated with the behavioral variables), or, most simply, a statistically-significant result may be a false positive. In other words, the null hypothesis of no correlation may be rejected when it is actually true. With a 95 percent significance level we would expect 1 false positive every 20 tests.

This last reason is why statistical experiments are normally subject to replication and verification before the research community in question accepts their conclusions. But for replication to be sensible we first need agreement on the variables being tested for correlation. We ain't got that yet.

"Not so. Rather:…"

I believe you meant to say, or in any case were only justified in saying:

"I object" or "I disagree". The fact that you hold a certain view in no way makes other views wrong. I realize that academic debate often stoops to the pretense that strongly held views are reality, but they are not.

Now, I'm going to have one more try at this. There are two broad points regarding Chen's work that seem vulnerable to examination, aside from strongly expressed personal views about how the world works. There are that Chen either has his statistical analysis right or he doesn't, and that if his statistical analysis is right, then there is something going on, but objections raised about the interpretation of EUROTYP measures (or non-measures, claims one author of EUROTYP) means we don't really know what the "something" is that Chen has found. The rest seems clamor that largely ignores what we can know about Chen's work. Has he found anything, and if so, what has he found?

You are also mistaken about Dahl's work on EUROTYP. I think he was very clear about this so I will copy his comments (above) here:

"[In my paper] I do not specify a binary classification of European languages (let alone the languages of the world) and I do not use the terms 'strong-FTR language' and 'weak-FTR language'."

further expanded in a later comment:

"What Thieroff and I did was to identify an area in northern Europe where languages lack a fully grammaticalized future tense (somewhat uncautiously labelled "futureless" by me). But we did not give criteria that could easily be applied in order to divide the languages of the world into two classes. As Chen makes clear in section 4.1. of his working paper, the extension to other languages is wholly his own."

To your larger point, that the "noisiness" may very well be causing, rather than weakening, the correlations found, I agree. The fact that Chen categorized languages himself (consulting available grammars to perform the classifications) certainly hints at the possibility of bias (however unintentional).

Ok, but my point remains. You are trying to assert a correlation between savings and "the degree to which marking FTR is grammaticalized" (to use your words). Well, EUROTYP used a formula (call it what you want, but having an army of linguists measure the "degree to which FTR is grammaticalized" according to a series of rules and intuitions is equivalent to a "formula" for the purposes of my comment) to classify these languages. Then you say, but we admit this formula (again call it what you want) is noisy, meaning there is a lot of grey areas in the classifications of the degree to which FTR is grammaticalized. You then assert (and here's where you go wrong) that the fact that the correlation between savings and degree to which FTR is grammaticalized is strong in the face of so much noise means the correlation would probably be even stronger if the noise was somehow eliminated. But my point is that this conclusion ignores the possibility that something else (some of the noise) may be what's causing the correlation in the first place, and so it's possible that savings and degree to which FTR is grammaticalized are completely uncorrelated in your data set but you just haven't managed to isolate the variable.

I am not claiming biological factors impact saving behaviors (although they may do) but cultural factors certainly do, and in ways which limit individual volition. For example, ask what is the entity doing the saving — the individual, the nuclear family, the extended family, or the entire community or village? The answers differ from one population to another, and it may make no sense in some cultures to talk about individual decision-making powers when decisions are made by larger groups. This is common sense to any anthropologist although economists still seem to struggle with any notion of decision-making other than an individual-based one.