> I am a bit confused as to what a herbicide and turtles have to do with one another? Personally I find demeaning other folks research a bit small minded

The point is: these researchers cite previous work, which does not in fact support there assertions. If your work is based on thin air, where do you stand? Hence, turtles all the way down. Rachel Carson did the same thing:

> Rachel Carson sounded the initial alarm against DDT, but represented the science of DDT erroneously in her 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson wrote “Dr. DeWitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.” 

> DeWitt’s 1956 article actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the “control” birds which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Perhaps she thought that her readers would never see the rather obscure journal in which DeWitt’s results were published, the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry. Otherwise, she surely would not have so badly misrepresented DeWitt’s results! 

It is incumbent upon any researchers to scrutinize other peoples work. It is not "demeaning," they expect it. 

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