Over the top? Necessary and effective? You decide.
Polar Bear from Plane Stupid on Vimeo.
Hat tip: The Z-Letter
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Darwin’s views are often misrepresented to the point of caricature, as we all know, but there have also been plenty of examples of literal caricature of Darwin in the popular media. I recently gave some talks about evolutionary imagery, which included popular press cartoons from the 1800s that had a common theme of caricaturing [...] From the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology comes a press release describing a paper in Nature about bacterial evolution… Bacteria Expect the Unexpected From today’s Nature, an editorial entitled Mind the spin: Scientists — and their institutions — should resist the ever-present temptation to hype their results. [skipping to the money quote...] …the temptation for scientists and their institutions to spin their research to the media, or to go publicity-mongering, is always there. And — as illustrated by the excessive public-relations [...] I liked it. Overall, I think the Discovery Channel did a good job of capturing the painstaking work that goes into scientific research, in this case spanning more than 15 years from discovery to publication. Some other quick thoughts: This was not hype. If anything, it was pretty modest, given the amount and significance [...] Tomorrow’s Science will be a special issue reporting tons of new information on the fossil hominid Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”), which is really exciting (though not as much as Darwinius, which was “like a meteor hitting the Earth” or whatever). There are news reports of course, including one at USA Today that I want to comment on [...] I don’t watch CSI. Ok, that’s not totally true or this post wouldn’t exist. I almost never watch it. I did catch a re-run while I was eating lunch on the weekend, an episode called “Overload” (some guy was electrocuted and fell off a building — I can’t exactly remember why). In [...] This is too funny. A website called Kill or Cure? has been compiling links to science stories in The Daily Mail (UK) and their apparent “ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent [...] Here’s the abstract of a paper set to be published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. Now, I think this kind of study is interesting and important. But it’s predictable that they start out with the standard (and historically false) claim that “non-coding DNA was long dismissed as junk” (seriously, do reviewers require authors [...] Dr. Mark Siddall is a friend of mine who is a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and a world expert on leech evolution. He also likes to cook. Leeches, not so tasty it turns out. He is the first researcher to be featured on PBS’s new web series, The Secret Life [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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