Yesterday’s announcement of a 47-million-year-old primate fossil nicknamed “Ida” has provoked a large, if uneven, media response.
A press release entitled “WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING” got reporters’ attention last week, after a pair of earlier scoops (which Nature blogged) revealed that the finding was an unusually intact primate fossil dating to 47 million years ago, a time when most primates looked more like squirrels than people.
The fossil’s official announcement yesterday came one week ahead of the US premiere of a television documentary unashamedly entitled “The Link”. A book by the same title appeared on US and UK bookshelves today, after waiting Harry Potter-style in sealed boxes, wrote the New York Times. The Times labeled the furore “science for the Mediacene age”.
Scientists and others have expressed admiration for the find and contempt for its reception in many media outlets.
The press releases and eventually the paper spawned news headlines such as “Fossil is human evolution ‘missing link”” (ITN). And in its print edition today, The Times of London headlined its article “Missing link discovery suggests Man is descended from a lemur”. which might prompt the question: which man, and which lemur? Unlike some outlets, however, an accompanying analysis points out that “There is no such thing as the missing link…there is no fossil that can fully explain an evolutionary transition all on its own.” The writer wrote a separate posting online questioning the wisdom of the Ida team’s media strategy.
Nearly 150 news stories appeared online within minutes of the announcement, according to a Google News timeline, and hundreds more have appeared since then. “I kept waiting to see an article that sought out some opinions from experts who were not involved in the discovery and analysis of the fossil,” gripes prominent science writer Carl Zimmer: “I never found one.”
Zimmer’s post is time-stamped 5:57pm, presumably US Eastern time, which was before the appearance of subsequent articles which did quote outsiders. Paleontologist Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (which the Los Angeles Times incorrectly placed at John Hopkins University) must have had a busy day: he spoke to Nature upon arrival at his office yesterday, and subsequently offered comment to Zimmer, the LA Times, and numerous other outlets.
Science’s coverage included a damning analysis of the researcher’s methods based on interviews with several outside sources:
Hurum and Gingerich’s analysis compared 30 to 40 traits in the new fossil with primitive and higher primates when standard practice is to analyze 200 to 400 traits and to include anthropoids from Egypt and the newer fossils of Eosimias from Asia, both of which were missing from the analysis in the paper.
Paleontology writer Brian Switek lamented on his blog Laelaps that “The problem is that they are using just one genus, Darwinius, to change the placement of an entire group without using any cladistic analysis!”
Other voices, including Nature’s own Adam Rutherford, had raised objections to the hype before the announcement, but were obligated by non-disclosure agreements to keep mum. Rutherford, moonlighting
in the Guardian yesterday, is no longer mum:
While I was being teased by the production team one of them informed me that it was a more important find than Lucy, our upright direct ancestor from 3 million years ago. As I recall, my kneejerk reaction to this was a wide eyed and sincere “fuck off”.
Jørn Hurum, the Norwegian researcher who orchestrated the project and who the BBC quoted saying the fossil is “the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor” had no qualms about his media strategy. During yesterday’s press conference, somebody asked him whether the publicity was overdone. “That’s part of getting science out to the public to get attention,” he told Fox News. “I don’t think that’s so wrong.”
Science media critic Charlie Petit, at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, has posted on the story twice already, and will probably add more later today: Here are yesterday’s post and last week’s post.
Maybe the healthiest strategy is to point out the distortion and laugh it off. At least one blogger appears to have decided, tongue-in-cheek, that if you can’t beat bad media outlets, you might as well join ‘em. And PHD Comics had a timely, if not directly connected cartoon Monday poking more fun at how science research filters to the public.
Image: Google’s special homepage image in honour of Ida.