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A recent article on Knight Science Journalism Tracker warned against taking sites like Science Daily as “news” services, since they really just echo institution press releases. However, in some cases it’s worse than just repetition. Here’s an example. From the University of Utah: Tibetans Evolved Genes to Live at High Elevations Obviously, a [...] Go read Carl Zimmer’s post “Yet-Another-Genome Syndrome” for an example of a science writer who truly gets it. Go. Right now. And add YAGS to your dictionary, along with DAP. Sigh. More nonsense from the British press to pile on top of the infamous “Darwin Was Wrong” cover of New Scientist. This time from the Guardian. Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong by Oliver “Don’t Know Much Biology” Burkeman. (Oh, and it’s because of epigenetics.) My favourite defence of the article [...] Over the top? Necessary and effective? You decide.
Polar Bear from Plane Stupid on Vimeo. Hat tip: The Z-Letter 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 Organisms ensure the survival of their species by genetically adapting to the environment. If environmental conditions change too rapidly, the extinction of a species may be the consequence. A strategy [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 one scene, [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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