There's a story about G H Hardy coming across a geneticist's work and proving that recessive genes persist at an equal concentration, against the original author's claims. This article reminds me a lot of that, where an expert in another field says "let me just check that for myself, errrr!".

I believe the Hardy story is told in C P Snow's foreword to A Mathematician's Apology, and the result is now well known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle