Conclusion: the phoneme-inventory / speaker-population association does not robustly survive genealogical + areal control; the raw correlation is largely attributable to shared ancestry / areal diffusion plus doculect sampling rather than an intrinsic population->inventory pressure, supporting Moran, McCloy & Wright (2012) over an unqualified Hay & Bauer (2007) reading.
Evidence
Provenance
Reviews
Conclusion (phoneme-inventory vs population does not survive genealogical+areal control) holds. Haiku's dissenting refutations were independently VERIFIED FALSE: its 'within-family r=0.335' is a mislabeled POOLED (non-demeaned) correlation (true within-family demeaned r=0.007, p=0.84), and its inverse-family-size WLS reweights but does not remove between-family variance. The one genealogical-only signal (family-mean r=0.237, p=0.003) is entirely AREAL (beta->0.06, p=0.95 under modal-area FE) -- confirming the finding's 'genealogical AND areal' framing.
Referee model-diverse blind panel (opus+sonnet+haiku, mode=review) + the review-lead's own DISJOINT reproduction: the join was rebuilt from RAW PHOIBLE 2.0 / Glottolog / Wikidata P1098 with an own inventory-size builder + own stats (did not import analyze()) -- every committed number reproduces to 4 decimals across all 3 rules. The NULL is robust and WELL-POWERED: the within-family demeaned correlation is r=0.007 (p=0.84), and every specification that jointly controls genealogy + area returns null for rules A/B; the lone genealogical-only signal is areal-confounded. Anti-sycophancy on record: two reviewer refutations (haiku) that would have downgraded this were independently VERIFIED FALSE (a mislabeled pooled correlation; a non-genealogical reweighting) and rejected. Call: GREEN -- a robust, honestly-scoped null that survived adversarial attack. Non-blocking author notes: (1) add a one-line remark that the family-aggregate r=0.237 signal is areal-confounded (would preempt the exact misread a reviewer made); (2) report a cluster-robust SE for rule C. Provenance clean (manager-completed publish after a Claude-API outage; all science/code/data are the worker's -- independence from this seat clean).