I'm pleased to see the handling editor address our concerns, however from your response I feel that you've not fully appreciated the issue and how it relates to the concludes. I'd therefore ask you to reconsider your response in light of the following comments.



You say "the conclusions of this study should not change after a re-analysis." If a major mathematical error in a model fails to change the conclusion then one has to ask whether the methodology properly evaluated the model. In this case, we can see that it did not. The only reason the conclusions stand is because the model was not tested on a sufficient broad set of data, such that none of the conspiracies investigated would have collapsed in a long enough time period for mortality to be a factor. This is equivalent to Newton suggesting a law of gravity that all objects fall to the ground within two seconds, but only ever testing it up to heights of one metre. Clearly if a model this flawed has no impact on the rest of the paper, there are serious methodological issues with how that model was investigated.



Thus, the entire content of the paper relating to mortality and decay models could effectively be removed. Now you suggest that this doesn't matter because the 'constant population' model still stands. However, the constant population model is simply a standard Poisson distribution with a probability plugged into it. There is no original contribution left.



Worse, in this case the probability plugged in is taken from just three examples, giving three probabilities. Two come out at around 0.000005, while the third is ~0.00025. The third number is over 50 times larger than the other two, orders of magnitude different. There's simply no way a general value for p could be extrapolated from such a paucity of data.



So in summary:

1) You agree that the only model that makes a substantive original contribution is completely flawed.

2) The only reason this didn't alter the conclusions is because the methodology was so flawed it failed to test the model adequately.

3) Without the flawed models, what is left is simply a standard probability curve, and not an original conclusion.

4) The values plugged in to that remaining model are, in any case, completely unsupportable.



I'd be very pleased to hear the handling editor's and author's response to points 1 to 4, and to understand what if any contribution they believe the remainder of the paper to make.