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Post by Dinotoyforum on Apr 26, 2008 16:16:27 GMT
This is a thread where we bash the media for misrepresenting evolution ;D
The problem seems to be that the word 'ancestor' has become press short-hand for "x and y share a close common ancestor". It's simple words for a simple (underestimated?) audience. We can never know direct ancestor descendent relationships.
To say T.rex is a chicken's ancestor is as ridiculous as saying humans are descended from chimps. The scientists know that, and I think the reporters do too - I guess 'Chicken rex' gets more traffic hits than the dull story this is in reality.
Unfortunately, this is seriously detrimental to the public understanding of evolution, and science as a whole.
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Post by richard on Apr 26, 2008 16:19:36 GMT
blame the media for this! The problem is that people don't get informed.
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Post by Dinotoyforum on Apr 26, 2008 16:21:22 GMT
blame the media for this! The problem is that people don't get informed. Which people don't get informed - the media, or the public?
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Post by richard on Apr 26, 2008 16:23:43 GMT
sometimes both, but I meant the public
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Post by Dinotoyforum on Apr 26, 2008 16:29:03 GMT
sometimes both, but I meant the public Even worse the public gets misinformed, so they think they know. Basing decisions on misinformation is somehow worse than being completely ignorant
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Post by sbell on Apr 26, 2008 19:17:13 GMT
sometimes both, but I meant the public Even worse the public gets misinformed, so they think they know. Basing decisions on misinformation is somehow worse than being completely ignorant The problem is that media people all come from the same pool as everyone else--and scientific understanding is not great among the general population, therefore as a proportion, you will probably run into most journalists not understanding what they read. Now add on editors who wish to torque the story to sound more impressive, as well as keeping it simple for us simple folks, and you have a recipe for complete and total wastes of time. Better science reporting can come from specialist sites like Livescience, but even then you can see that sometimes the need for concision or story-telling get in the way of the facts
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Post by piltdown on Apr 26, 2008 23:38:05 GMT
That birds and dinosaurs are related has been known since the time of Queen Victoria and T. H. Huxley, so, as Dinotoyforum pointed out, this is indeed a dull story and should not have generated the amount of almost hysterical attention it did. The New York Times might as well tell us with bated breath that water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. I may just be paranoid, but I suspect something else is going on: 1. How many other analyses of protein sequences do we see featured on hundreds of news articles? 2. Why is it that every move of the team analyzing the t. rex proteins has been propagated through the popular/mainstream media through articles and features and sycophantic interviews? Mary Schweizter has been profiled in science magazines more often than many Nobel prize winners. 3. Very few news outlets even mentioned that this is the second paper released by Asara et al. Definitely not a single one of them reported the fact that the first study has been thoroughly refuted by another team of scientists, who re-studied the protein sequences that were derived and found out that the data actually showed tyrannosaurs were more closely related to newts than birds. www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5859/33c4. The 'feature', such as it is, of this latest study is that alligators and lizards were included in the protein analysis. Yet only the New Scientist pointed out that ALL the phylogenetic trees they produced shows that anole lizards aren't diapsids, which is a preposterous conclusion. And the gator did not fare too well either, being a sister taxon to opossums. It's all chicken, chicken, chicken. 5. Only the Washington Post reported that a separate team of scientists from the University of California at San Diego is already preparing for publication a refutation of these findings. Pavel Pevzner, director of the Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology at the University of California at San Diego, said his own research, soon to be published, refutes Asara's work. He said he cannot describe details until they are published, but he was blunt in his response to the new study, which appears in today's issue of the journal Science.
The findings are "a joke," Pevzner wrote in an e-mail. "Serious evolutionary biologists will laugh reading this piece." My conspiratorial take: somebody on the team is preparing a book or movie about the t.rex 'soft' tissue and has hired a PR firm or agent to circulate all the news and quash all demurring voices.
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Post by tomhet on Apr 27, 2008 3:26:00 GMT
For a moment I misread the title of the thread - Chicken sex ;D
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Post by Dinotoyforum on Apr 27, 2008 10:17:00 GMT
Chicken sex? great swinging flabby globules of rubbery red flesh is your thing I think you may have a problem
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Post by Dinotoyforum on Apr 27, 2008 10:25:49 GMT
"My conspiratorial take: somebody on the team is preparing a book or movie about the t.rex 'soft' tissue and has hired a PR firm or agent to circulate all the news and quash all demurring voices."
Hmmm, how exactly does a PR firm quash demurring voices?
I think it's much more simple and likely that media reporters are just dumb/looking for a fun story. We know this is often the case (a plesiosaur can't be discovered without mention of the loch ness monster for example), so there is no need to invoke any conspiracy. A conspiracy does not provide any additional explanatory power.
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Post by sbell on Apr 27, 2008 15:04:10 GMT
"My conspiratorial take: somebody on the team is preparing a book or movie about the t.rex 'soft' tissue and has hired a PR firm or agent to circulate all the news and quash all demurring voices." Hmmm, how exactly does a PR firm quash demurring voices? I think it's much more simple and likely that media reporters are just dumb/looking for a fun story. We know this is often the case (a plesiosaur can't be discovered without mention of the loch ness monster for example), so there is no need to invoke any conspiracy. A conspiracy does not provide any additional explanatory power. Well, to be fair, there are some institutions and paleontological personalities that do have PR firms, or even PR departments, for getting word out of whatever they are doing--Bakker, Horner, Currie and Sereno are great examples of people who always seem to get in the news (ever wondered why we still hear about the dead horse that is "T rex was only a scavenger"?). It isn't really a conspiracy to quash dissension (that would be the role of governments and the industrial & media empires, but of course that never happens in democracies). However, it is likely the desire to overwhelm the science reporting with whatever their researchers do. It helps increase familiarity which can aid in securing funding and attracting other researchers. And if it is something the reporters think the public will like (say, dinosaurs) it's generally easier. Imagine a report on a new species of trilobite or ammonite? Won't happen unless it is somehow spectacular, or was somehow a human interest story ("blind boy trips on, discovers world's largest belemnite").
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Post by giganotoigauana on Apr 27, 2008 16:25:14 GMT
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Post by tomhet on Apr 27, 2008 22:11:58 GMT
Chicken sex? great swinging flabby globules of rubbery red flesh is your thing Indeed
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Post by Dinotoyforum on Apr 28, 2008 9:14:19 GMT
Chicken sex? great swinging flabby globules of rubbery red flesh is your thing Indeed urg! please lets never talk about poultry again.
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Post by piltdown on Apr 28, 2008 19:46:21 GMT
Chicken sex? great swinging flabby globules of rubbery red flesh is your thing Indeed Sorry, couldn't resist ;D
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Post by Dinotoyforum on Apr 28, 2008 20:20:54 GMT
Indeed Sorry, couldn't resist ;D noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
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Post by sbell on Apr 28, 2008 21:06:24 GMT
Sorry, couldn't resist ;D noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Perhaps we shouldn't do this to Tomhet And this, I think, is where most of us draw the line with feathered dinos. Fine, put them on a species where fossil evidence tells us. Put them on animals that are cladistically related. But come on--do they have to look like Thanksgiving Dinner before the slaughter?
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tiermann
Full Member
Playmosaurus
Posts: 142
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Post by tiermann on Apr 28, 2008 22:10:15 GMT
That is hilarious. Obviously you have found the root of the conspiracy, it's all a book marketing scheme.
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Post by piltdown on Apr 28, 2008 23:47:41 GMT
More great swinging flabby globules of rubbery red flesh for our moderator ;D This time it's a leaellynasaura. Yup, a fuzzy hypsilophodont with wattles. From Thomas Holtz's "Dinosaurs" book. How he allowed such a thing to be included, with precious little taxonomic or fossil justification, is beyond me. Alas, it's not only the popular media that purveys dubious information. And that's a fluffy allosaurus too.
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Post by tomhet on Apr 29, 2008 3:28:48 GMT
^^^ That's disgusting.
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