When The Wrath of Grapes Meets Science

With a PhD in cognitive science and a qualification in wine, sometimes I like to get drunk on the sweet nectar of fermented grapes and complain write about scientific studies and current issues in academia.

[mydrunkscience-blog]

Brainless Helpings for the Masses

This topic is inspired by attempting to watch an episode of iZombie after I used a bottle of Chenin Blanc to wash down a prawn risotto and how annoyed I got by what passed for the physical anatomy of brains on said show. It fills with me with so much rage I could probably write an entire blog post just on how stupid it is, but instead we’re going to talk about the media, which in a way is also like a fantasy version of real life. I don’t know why, but I’m still often shocked by what passes for scientific news these days. Sometimes it feels like the mainstream media is purposely trying to piss me off by targeting my weak tolerance for exaggerated bullshit.

As an example let’s take a rather pointless article by lead author Scott Frank about the relationship between texting and health behaviours in teenagers. The research indicated that teens who they called ‘hyper-texters’ (attention seeking assholes who sent more than 120 messages a day) made up nearly 20% of their sample, and this hyper-texting was positively correlated to engaging in so called risky behaviours such as having tried cigarettes and alcohol, being a binge drinker, using drugs, getting into fights and being sexually active with multiple partners. Now we all know that correlation does not equal causation, so it doesn’t make much sense to say that a simple love of texting causes people to make more nefarious life choices. You could just as easily conclude that some other factor such as personality traits like extroversion or neuroticism, or economic status, or lack of parental supervision, or whatever has more impact on both texting and health behaviours than a direct correlation between the two. In fact, a quick look at the study demographics shows that the hyper-texters tended to be females from a lower socioeconomic status who had no male parental figure in the home. Golly gee, I wonder if any of these things could play into the health choices of adolescents? But getting back to the point, this is how the various media headlines played out:

‘Texting causes health risks for teens.’ (Chicago Tribune)

‘Teen texting leads to poor health.’ (ABC News 4)

‘Too much texting increases health risks in teens.’ (WebMD)

I’d like to think that even Karl Pilkington would have some words of wisdom in this situation.

Now some people would like to blame the researchers themselves for giving bad press releases, but surely your entire job as a journalist shouldn’t be to abandon common sense and just write whatever crap you’re given based on a few quotations? Or maybe I’m the one being delusional for wanting some level of standard here. And if you think this kind of irresponsible fear mongering doesn’t happen very often, then you are mistaken my friend.

Even I Fucking Love Science, which started as a fun (if not somewhat plagiarised) dose of interesting discoveries written by Elise, has grown far too big for itself and devolved into a cesspool of clickbait that should really be rebranded as I Fucking Need an Editor. You would think this was possible given that they seem to have the money to consistently recruit new staff, but it’s hard to believe that many of those staff members have actually read over an article for spelling and grammatical errors before publishing. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel the authenticity of any claims made in a piece of writing are somewhat diminished by an author’s inability to even type a sentence properly. I’m quite tipsy right now and I could probably whip out five highly acceptable IFLS stories by reading a few abstracts and using the spellcheck built into my browser, so why is the LabX Media Group not paying me?

This lack of rigorous reporting from most news outlets is made even worse by social media and every single person who is guilty of reposting stories as fact without actually fact checking. The proliferation of miscommunication and even deliberate lies can feel overwhelming if I pay enough attention. No joke, I once got into a heated argument with someone on Facebook over a picture of an owl

.

So how do you not fall into the trap of hype and sensationalism? Well, you can start by not being so trusting. Take what you read in the news with a grain of salt, make an effort to find the original publication in an academic journal and actually read it if it’s not locked behind a paywall. Arm yourself with all the information possible and come to your own conclusions rather than accepting whatever you’re told, or else I’m going to make badly Photoshopped pictures of animals about you.

[mydrunkscience-blog]

I got a paper accepted in a respected journal!

APRIL FOOLS!

[sobbing]

[mydrunkscience-blog]

Dino-MITE!

I can’t help but notice that dinosaurs have been dominating my news feed as of late. Apparently there’s a lot of drama surrounding the possible reclassification of certain dinosaurs due to a new Nature article, because it turns out that basing all of your evolutionary theories on some sexy pelvises wasn’t actually that smart after all.

The story goes a little something like this: A really long time ago when Verdi was still composing operas and Doyle was first publishing Sherlock Holmes, dinosaurs were separated into two main clades based on the fossil records of hip bones. I can’t remember the names of these two groups exactly and I can’t be bothered to look them up, so let’s call them Oreo and Sriracha. Oreos had bird-like hip bones and, being antisocial and nihilistic by nature, occupied their own branch of the dinosaur family tree. Srirachas on the other hand had reptile-like hip bones and occupied their own branch too, but this branch split into two further groups: the pussy vegetarian Salads and the bloody cannibalistic T-bones. Now there is also another group of dinosaurs, the Hermaphrodites. Scientists can’t seem to agree where they belong or if they are even dinosaurs at all, so in the traditional family tree they tend to float off in a confused world of their own, no doubt feeling rejected and welcoming the mass extinction.  

Fast forward to now. Based on throwing hundreds of anatomical features other than the hip bones of 70 different specimens into a computer, the new study found a greater similarity between Oreos and T-bones than Srirachas and T-bones. After this result came up numerous times despite fiddling around with the descriptions of features, the new proposed family tree suggests Oreos should be evolutionarily grouped with T-bones, and Salads should be evolutionarily grouped with Hermaphrodites. I’m not a paleontologist or anything, but to me that seems pretty logical. Like has someone not thought before this investigation that maybe it makes more sense that dinosaurs discovered to have feathers would be closer in relation to bird-hipped dinosaurs than, say, a giant fucking Brontosaurus?

This is of course all just a theory based on one study that might turn out to be wrong, but at least it’s gotten people talking. In order for the new tree to be accepted, the authors are going to have to come up with some compelling arguments as to why and how the evolution of a specailised diet would have happened twice. But that’s for another day!

I don’t think the average person realises just how little information paleontologists, archeologists, anthropologists, etc. go by when developing theories about natural history. Do you know how rare it is to find a complete skeleton of any kind? Very. Part of the reason our understanding of the biological past is going to change, and should change, on a regular basis is because we’re actually pretty fucking clueless about it. Imagine being given the outline to a vast puzzle but all the pieces you can find are only from one corner. You have a pretty good idea of what that corner looks like, and you might even be able to guess at the whole picture, but you’re still missing too many pieces to really know what the puzzle is or even if you put the pieces you do have in the correct positions. I remember watching a documentary by Werner Herzog where he was interviewing an expert fossil hunter. The documentary might have actually been about volcanoes which makes me wonder now why they were talking to this guy in the first place, but the bones they were meticulously extracting were so small and scattered that it was amazing they knew what they were at all. At one point a fragment of skull about the size of my thumb pad was dug up and everyone was so excited they basically pissed themselves, because that’s what amounts to good evidence. I just sat there thinking, ‘Well, that’s some shit right there.’

[mydrunkscience-blog]

Depression

Sad Chairs of Academia is my new favourite blog, because I feel like there is a piece of me in every one of those chairs.