ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 705
August 26, 2015
Megginson in the Field
Darwin quotation at the Field Museum. Photograph: Andrew Crusoe, https://www.flickr.com/photos/3484398..., used under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
I was visiting Chicago, that toddling town, in late July and early August, 2015, and I was inexorably attracted to the Field Museum of Natural History—one of the world’s greatest natural history museums, according to my guidebook, as well as the permanent home of a T. rex named Sue. (Speaking of Sue, while I was in Chicago, I attended a marvelous production at the Mercury Theater of Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash, which culminated with a performance of the Shel Silverstein song “A Boy Named Sue”—which, as I have mentioned before here at the Science League of America, was supposedly inspired by Sue Hicks, a Dayton, Tennessee, attorney who helped to prosecute John T. Scopes in 1925. It is owing to such coincidences that I find it difficult to take a real vacation away from the creationism/evolution conflict.)
Anyhow, the Field Museum amply lived up to the guidebook’s description. The part that I liked the best, unsurprisingly, was the permanent Evolving Planet exhibit, which, according to the museum’s website, “takes visitors on an awe-inspiring journey through 4 billion years of life on Earth, from single-celled organisms to towering dinosaurs and our extended human family. Unique fossils, animated videos, hands-on interactive displays, and recreated sea- and landscapes help tell the compelling story of evolution—the single process that connects everything that’s ever lived on Earth.” After writing a multipart series on tree diagrams here (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4), my colleague Stephanie Keep will be particularly pleased to hear that there was a cladogram at practically every display.
There’s a lot to like about Evolving Planet, and I won’t attempt even to inventory the high points: you simply should go visit the Field Museum in person. Thanks to a microsite, you can even see a lot of the exhibit on-line, without visiting Chicago—but you apparently can’t see the climax. At the very end of Evolving Planet, a curved alcove features perhaps a hundred backlit circles with brightly colored photographs of various organisms, amid which there appears the iconic quotation from the conclusion of On the Origin of Species: “…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved,” correctly attributed to Charles Darwin. Correctly attributed, but also apt and moving and, at 111 characters, eminently tweetable (see, e.g., the Field Museum’s own March 5, 2015, tweet).
Elsewhere, though, the idea of using a quotation from Darwin to encapsulate the guiding thought behind a whole exhibit crashed and burned. A temporary exhibit called Mammoths and Mastodons reviews the evolutionary history of the Proboscidea, which—parenthetically—always makes me melancholy. Of the ten families of Proboscidea, only the Elephantidae—represented only by Asian elephants and African elephants—are alive today. And elephants aren’t doing so well themselves, thanks to us. Anyhow, at the end of Mammoths and Mastodons, there prominently appears on a wall the following quotation: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent… It is the one that is the most adaptable to change,” attributed to Charles Darwin. Reasonably apt, reasonably moving, and at 107 characters, still tweetable—but not correctly attributed.
The “most adaptable to change” quotation was posted by the Darwin Correspondence Project in a list of “Six things Darwin never said—and one he did” a while back. In 2009, writing on The Panda’s Thumb blog, my former colleague Nick Matzke (now a research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra) identified the actual source of the quotation: Leon C. Megginson, Professor of Management and Marketing at Louisiana State University, who offered it as a paraphrase of Darwin’s thinking first in a paper published in 1963. Matzke commented, “The quote appears to start as a paraphrase; there is no evidence that Megginson initially intended this to be taken as an exact quote; rather, at some later stage, someone copied down the phrase (perhaps in lecture notes, for example), and then later assumed it was an actual quote of Darwin.”
The Field Museum isn’t the first museum to have been megginsoned, to coin a word. On the floor of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the “most adaptable to change” quotation appears in foot-high letters on the stone floor. It remains there, but the academy removed its misattribution to Darwin when informed of it, according to Colin Purrington. The Field Museum’s version of it appears to have simply been painted or printed on the wall, so it would presumably be considerably easier to fix, but the Mammoths and Mastodons exhibit closes on September 13, 2015, so I’m not optimistic about the museum summoning the will to fix it first. “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation,” as I think that Leon Megginson once said, “but the history of science shows how, fortunately, this power does not endure long.”
Rare, Hairy Nautilus Spotted For The First Time in 30 Years
Photo credit:
Allonautilus scrobiculatus off the coast of Ndrova Island in Papua New Guinea. Peter Ward
Distant relatives of squid and cuttlefish, nautiluses are an ancient lineage often nicknamed “living fossils” because their shells have appeared in the archaeological record for over 500 million years. They’ve survived two of the planet’s largest mass extinctions. This summer, researchers have spotted a rare nautilus called Allonautilus scrobiculatus for the first time in three decades. Until now, only two people have ever laid eyes on it.
August 25, 2015
Cosmetic Ads’ Science Claims Lack Foundation
“Clinically Proven.” “Breakthrough Technology.” “Ten Years of Genetic Research.” These are phrases you might expect to find in the pages of Scientific American. But these descriptions also show up in commercials and print ads for cosmetics.
Now a study finds that some—well, make that a lot—of those science-sounding claims are simply not true.
Researchers looked at nearly 300 ads in magazines such as Vogue. They analyzed claims in the ads and ranked them on a scale ranging from acceptable to outright lie. And they found that just 18 percent of the boasts that the researchers looked at were true. 23 percent were outright lies. And 42 percent were too vague to even classify. The study is in the Journal of Global Fashion Marketing. [Jie G. Fowler, Timothy H. Reisenwitz and Les Carlson, Deception in cosmetics advertising: Examining cosmetics advertising claims in fashion magazine ads]
The Food and Drug Administration regulates what goes into your cosmetics and what goes on the label. If a claim is blatantly untrue, the FDA can take action. Vague language on labels may be a way to keep the FDA at bay.
Meanwhile, ads are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. Just last year they charged L’Oreal for deceptive advertising of its Génifique products, which the company said were “clinically proven” to boost genes’ activity that would lead to the production of proteins causing “visibly younger skin in just 7 days.” A settlement agreement forced L’Oreal to back off on the claims.
So take those cosmetic ads with a grain of that salt scrub—after all, if scientists had really come up with a product that reversed your wrinkles or grew your eyelashes, it would sell itself.
—Erika Beras
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
Photographer Captures Bee Peeing Mid-flight
Photo credit:
A bee caught short while flying. Mark Parrott
We do love to provide you with the weird and wonderful, but even we can barely bee-lieve this. (Not sorry)
Why Are Some People Selfish?
Photo credit:
Selfish people's brain's spike in activity when someone is nice to them. PathDoc/Shutterstock
Most of us are at least a little selfish, but some more so than others. In order to get what we want in life we tend to reward those who are good to us by being good back to them, and punish those who aren't. But there are a minority of people, known as “Machiavellians,” who pay no regard to these social norms.
Luke And Leia Might Be Twins – But Thanks To Space Travel, They Wouldn’t Be The Same Age
Photo credit:
Younger than he looks... 20th Century Fox.
Luke and Leia had a bit of a rough time in the Star Wars universe. Twins born during the Great Jedi Purge, they went on to live wholly separate lives, only meeting each other as adults for the first time when faced with defeating the evil Galactic Empire.
This Atom Makes Quantum Computing Light Work
Photo credit:
Abstract concept of a photon interacting with a particle. agsandrew/Shutterstock.
The elusive dream of quantum computing might seem far off, but researchers everywhere are trying to figure out solutions to get us closer to these powerful computers. One team of scientists from the University of Toronto has succeeded in making an important tool in computing, a logic gate, from a single atom. It uses clever optical effects to transmit information. The research is published in Nature Physics.
Check Out This Awesome View From a Blue Whale’s Back
Photo credit:
Screenshot of footage from Hopkins Marine Station/Stanford University/Big Blue Live
Gargantuan oceanic treasures, blue whales are a fascinating species. Thought to be the largest creature to have inhabited our planet, their measurements are pretty mind-blowing. Reaching up to 30 meters (100 feet) in length, their tongues can weigh as much as an elephant, and check out how big the hearts of these gentle giants can be.
Astronauts Spot Mysterious Sprites From The International Space Station
Photo credit:
Tiny red sprite above a U.S. storm. ISS/JSC/NASA.
Thunderstorms are ferocious natural phenomena. Crackles of lightning and booms of thunder reign over the surface of the Earth. However, something else occasionally floats ethereally above the storm clouds: a short-lived sprite. These curious bursts of energy have been spotted not once, but twice in one evening by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS).
Free Passes To National Parks Today
Photo credit:
High lining above Yosemite. U.S. National Park Flickr CC BY 2.0
The National Park Service (NPS) is offering free entry to all of its 408 parks today (25 August), to celebrate its 99th birthday.
Yosemite Valley tunnel view 2010. Chensiyuan/Wikimedia
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