I felt obligated to put this response out, but I don't think I've done
a great job of describing these issues in modern statistics to this
varied audience...


Well, I did have to read it a couple of times to get the meat out of it  ; )

So, what do you make of these so-called meta-analyses, where the authors scoop up all the available papers and try to tease out the bigger picture? For example, 

In: "Dietary traces of neonicotinoid pesticides as a cause of population declines in honey bees: an evaluation by Hill’s epidemiological criteria" James E Cresswell, Nicolas Desneux and Dennis vanEngelsdorp

They state:
The aim is to define exacting demographic conditions for a detrimental factor to precipitate a population decline, and Hill’s epidemiological ‘causality criteria’ are employed as a structured process for making an expert judgement about the proposition that trace dietary neonicotinoids in nectar and pollen cause population declines in honey bees.

RESULTS: In spite of the absence of decisive experimental results, the analysis shows that, while the proposition is a substantially justified conjecture in the context of current knowledge,it is also substantially contraindicated by a wide variety of circumstantial epidemiological evidence.

CONCLUSION: It is concluded that dietary neonicotinoids cannot be implicated in honey bee declines, but this position is provisional because important gaps remain in current knowledge. Avenues for further investigations to resolve this longstanding uncertainty are therefore identified.

Pete

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