So is the possibility that attention is an emergent genetic trait. There are many, many alternative explanations. You are lamenting the exclusion of your preferred alternative explanation, but the researchers need to choose one and look further along that branch.

The idea of open science is that other teams would be free to explore plausible alternative hypotheses. Some team might explore yours. Another might dig into my idea about the behavior’s relationship to genetics. And so on.

This is the method by which we move ourselves forward. And it’s easy to see how that effort is hampered by the practice of data tampering and other shenanigans. Which this team did not engage in, even when part of there hypothesis wasn’t supported by their data.

This team deserves a “Bravo!”