If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I often feel frustrated by press releases that are overhyped, misleading, and/or laden with buzzwords and cliches. Today I received by email the most over the top press release I have ever seen. It’s the sort of thing one might expect to [...]
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I already called this one out, but it gets even worse. William Raillant-Clark’s Summary In one sentence: I work with media professionals to ensure they have an opportunity to report on the world-class scientific research undertaken at the University of Montreal. A typical example: 1. I take this: Nature “Acoelomorph flatworms are deuterostomes related [...] Busy, but need to vent a little about these stories. 1. New evolutionary research disproves living missing link theories Evolution is not a steady march towards ever more sophisticated beings and therefore the search for the living “missing links” is pointless, according to findings published by a team of researchers led by Dr. Hervé [...] Example headline: Massive Daphnia genome leads to understanding gene-environment interactions Photo by Paul Hebert It’s a cool species, an important addition to the cadre of species whose genomes have been sequenced, it has a notably large number of genes (>30,000, according to the current annotation — rice has >40,000, by the way), and [...] This is BRILLIANT. From The Lay Scientist by Martin Robbins at The Guardian. This is a news website article about a scientific paper In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific [...] I love this term introduced by Ed Yong in his post Do new discoveries ever “rewrite evolutionary history”?, which opens with: You can’t go for a month without seeing a claim that some new discovery has rewritten evolutionary history. If headlines are to be believed, phylogeny – the business of drawing family trees between [...] Brian Switek has a paper coming out in Evolution: Education and Outreach that discusses the nonsense surrounding Darwinius, dubbed hyper-hypefully “the link”, and the contribution that blogs played in setting the record straight. Check it out. If I were to put together a respectful, short, easy to follow resource of major evolutionary concepts that science writers could consult whenever they wrote a piece involving evolutionary aspects, would they use it? Would my friends in the science writer world promote it, refer colleagues to it, send authors who get things wrong [...] Two students and I currently have a paper in review on genome sizes in sponges, but whether it is accepted or needs major revisions, we will have to update the reference list. This is because the genome sequence of the sponge Amphimedon queenslandica was just published. This is very cool, and allows some interesting [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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