Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Absolutely not, but it does "waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'", in the famous words of Randall Munroe. (Munroe was speaking of correlation vs. causation, but the same principle applies.)
Calwaterbear is reasonably justified in thinking that Sykes has
not gone off his rocker. Heck, Cal himself has offered to test samples for people, so the mere fact that Sykes has done the same is hardly going to convince
Cal that Sykes is now a True B'liev'r.
We'll know soon enough, but I expect that Sykes is taking the opportunity to throw a little solid science at some folks who rarely encounter such things. I expect him to talk about how DNA testing works. I expect him to mention BF only in carefully chosen, purely hypothetical terms. He's not going to offend them by saying BF doesn't exist, but he's carefully not going to say it does. Then he'll collect his speaker's fee, and depart, with everyone happy.
Yes, any number of respected elder scientists have gone crazy in the past. But the plural of anecdote is not data. As a
percentage of all respected elderly scientists, that number has a
whole bunch of zeros after the decimal point. If I were a betting man, I'd put money on Sykes not being crazy. At least until those fateful words, "the evidence is inconclusive, but I'm sure we'll find BF soon" fall from his lips.
