I know I said I was going to ignore LiveScience after a string of ridiculous articles. I really have tried to. But today someone brought to my attention a truly silly story and asked if perhaps it was blog-worthy. Indeed it is, even though it required me to visit the site that I had vowed to avoid.

The story is about frogs and snakes. In particular, Dahl’s aquatic frog and the northern death adder in Australia. The frogs are toxic or may be covered by a sticky glue-like substance, but the snakes manage to consume them nonetheless by killing the frog and then waiting for the objectionable substances to degrade before eating the prey. The frog usually travels some distance before succumbing to the snake’s venom, at which time the predator tracks it down and devours it. Assessing the state of non-lethal doses of toxin in their mouths after the initial bite of the frogs allows the snakes to discriminate between species of toxic prey, such that they wait, say, 30 minutes post mortem before eating one species of frogs, but 40 minutes for a different species whose toxins persist slightly longer before breaking down.

This is all well and good, and is an interesting interaction about which I was not aware. But, in typical fashion, LiveScience manages to butcher some basic evolutionary ideas. Here is where the whole thing goes off the rails:

Evolutionary theory predicts that the adder’s tactic is foolproof: Natural selection stops operating after an individual’s death, so the frogs will probably never evolve longer-lasting toxins in response to the clever snakes.

So, just to review. The snake bites the frog, which is toxic, and gets some of the toxin in its mouth. This toxin ingested by the snake is at a concentration too low to be fatal, but the toxin itself is poisonous enough to kill a snake at higher concentrations unless it waits for the compound to degrade after the frog wonders off and dies sometime later.

Can anyone see how mutations of small effect in some frogs might make the “clever” snakes’ “trick”, not very “fool-proof”?

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Follow up

Over at The Loom, science writer Carl Zimmer provides a link to what he considers an excellent example of science writing. I want to point out the way he sets this up, which I think is of interest in light of what is often discussed on this blog:

I’m sometimes asked who my favorite science writers are. I don’t like science writers per se; I like science writing, or rather some science writing–the passages and chapters and books that remind me just how good science writing can get, just how high above the wasteland of hackery, dishonest simplification, and cliches it can rise.

Carl is, of course, quite right about this. Not just in expressing frustration at the wasteland of mediocrity, but also about the fact that it is good writing rather than writers that should be of interest. Obviously, one who produces consistently good writing can be said to be a good writer, but this does not mean that he or she can be considered, nor expected, to be infallible when it comes to accurately reporting scientific information. I have tried to focus on individual stories rather than criticizing particular writers, but this is a lesson that I will have to keep more clearly in mind.

The BBC story about Dr. Curry’s “predictions” for the future of human evolution that I discussed in the previous post was released in Oct. 2006, but now the Daily Mail has run a very similar article as well. Like the BBC, they claim that a “top scientist” made serious “predictions” along these lines. Other blogs seem to have taken them at their word and have assumed the Curry really meant all this as real science.

If you read his original “Bravo Report“, it is pretty obvious that he was using very hypothetical sci-fi kinds of examples as illustrations of general evolutionary concepts (sympatric speciation, assortative mating, sexual selection) and not much more. An easily sensationalized and therefore ill-chosen tact, to be sure, but not the outrageous idiocy for which he is being slammed.

I don’t think my interpretation is far off, given the following preamble to Curry’s essay:

In the summer of 2006 I was commissioned by Bravo Television to write an essay on the future of human evolution. The essay was intended as a ‘science fiction’ way of illustrating some aspects of evolutionary theory.

Bravo then sent out a press release on the essay, but did not release the essay itself. As a result, a wildly distorted version of what I had written ended up being reported as ‘science fact’ in the media. I do not endorse the content of these media reports.

A lesson for bloggers: always read the original source, especially if a media story seems too silly to be true.

I honestly, and obviously naively, thought that I had seen the stupidest speculation passed off as science news with the LiveScience “report” that humans will be marrying robots within 45 years (at least in Massachusetts) [The story that caused me to stop reading LiveScience].

I have quite a few science news feeds pumping content into my aggregator. These have been quite useful, and have brought to my attention several interesting studies that I would not have read about otherwise. (Although one does, of course, have to consult the primary articles to get past the common problems in media reports).

Unfortunately, the gems appear to be rare amidst the rubble of science writing on these services. Many of them are just parroted press releases (which, as we all know, can be the worst for sensationalizing research). Others have staff writers producing original contributions. LiveScience is one with its own writers, some of which I have complimented (here and here), and others I have criticized (here and here), in previous posts.

But here’s the post that finally earned LiveScience their walking papers:

Forecast: Sex and Marriage with Robots by 2050

In it, we are treated to the musings of David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who earned a Ph.D. for writing a thesis claiming that humans will marry robots within the next few decades. If you think that’s ridiculous, wait until you see what he told LiveScience in this story:

“My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots.”

“Massachusetts is more liberal than most other jurisdictions in the United States and has been at the forefront of same-sex marriage. There’s also a lot of high-tech research there at places like MIT.”

“If you ask me if every human will want to marry a robot, my answer is probably not. But will there be a subset of people? There are people ready right now to marry sex toys.”

“Maybe some other relationships could welcome a robot. Instead of a woman saying, ‘Darling, not tonight, I have a headache,’ you could get ‘Darling, I have a headache, why not use your robot?'”

“The question is not if this will happen, but when. I am convinced the answer is much earlier than you think.”

“Love and sex with robots are inevitable.”

This is not science, it is not news, and it is not something I want cluttering up my aggregator feed. So long, LiveScience, it’s been a slice.

It pains me to say it, but in light of other complaints from scientists in the blogosphere (e.g., here and here), I am actually beginning to wonder if, despite the efforts of some excellent writers, science reporting on the whole does more harm than good. I despise the ivory tower approach to academia (hence this blog), but in my opinion misinformation is worse than missing information. PZ suggests that scientists are just going to have to handle much of the reporting themselves — maybe, but we also have other things to do. Science writers — I mean, the good ones (and I know there are lots of you out there and that you are just as frustrated as I am) — what can be done about all this?

Back in July, LiveScience ran a piece by Andrea Thompson entitled Global warming: how do scientists know they’re not wrong? Although one could argue that there is too much straining to seem “balanced” (the two deniers quoted receive a vastly disproportionate bit of page space relative to the consensus in science), it is generally a very interesting look at how science deals with politically controversial areas of inquiry, particularly when they involve questions that are not easily amenable to laboratory experimentation or direct observation or which involve extrapolation from available, smaller-scale observations. The parallels with evolution are clear. The lesson: science operates according to a set of principles, and if you reject those principles because some of the conclusions they produce are distasteful to you, you may do so at your own (and everyone else’s) peril.

From Genome Technology Online:

Perhaps They Should’ve Called It “One Man’s Treasure” DNA
September 17, 2007

It seems people are a little touchy about the use of the term “junk DNA.” On his Genomicron blog, TR Gregory attempts to put an end to the debate by harking back to the origins of the term, along with an exegesis of how it has been used over time and in various settings.

While GTO doesn’t doubt the accuracy of Gregory’s information, we have to say: his argument that scientists referred to these genomic regions as “junk” all while understanding how very important they were leaves us a little, well, dubious. But maybe we’re just naturally cynical.

Let me help you out. Comings (1972), who provided the first detailed exposition of the “junk DNA” idea (his article appeared in print before Ohno’s), wrote: “Being junk doesn’t mean it is entirely useless. Common sense suggests that anything that is completely useless would be discarded.” Orgel and Crick (1980), who developed the idea of “selfish DNA”, wrote: “It would be surprising if the host organism did not occasionally find some use for particular selfish DNA sequences, especially if there were many different sequences widely distributed over the chromosomes. One obvious use … would be for control purposes at one level or another. This seems more than plausible.” Both approaches emphasized non-function based on proposed mechanisms of non-coding DNA increase. And both sets of authors noted that some of it would be functional.

Why people seem incapable of a) understanding a mildly complex history, and b) reading the literature is inexplicable to me. Given how much interest there is in non-coding DNA in the press and among anti-evolutionists, I think it is worth getting it straight.