Comment on On boiling frogs by Stephen Oberauer

Curiously, I also wrote about boiling frogs in a novel that I’ve been writing. It’s a problem with human thinking that really bugs me.

Here’s a snippet, in case you’re interested:

When I was thirteen my biology teacher taught us something foolish. She told us that, if one were to place a frog in a pot of cold water and heat it up slowly, the frog would simply croak away happily, enjoying the warmth, thinking about munching on a large, juicy fly, ignorant of the fact that in a few minutes it will be too hot to jump out and will be well on its way to the froggy afterlife.

What somehow managed to slip my teacher’s mind was that some of us mischievous science nerds would consider this an interesting hypothesis not to be believed until it had been thoroughly processed by the scientific method, tested, re-tested, peer reviewed and published. I looked over at Jim who nodded and winked, apparently having the same thought as myself.

After school the two of us wondered off to a nearby pond. With my lunch box in my hand, I quickly captured a frog; a big one, but still agile enough to be able to hop out of a small pot.

When we arrived at my home I explained the experiment to my little brother, who was just as excited about furthering his scientific studies as we were. I poured cold water into a pot and placed it on the cold stove. The silly frog, however, was not very interested in science and decided to hop out of the cold pot before we had turned the stove on at all. Repeating the experiment produced the same results and I came to the conclusion that my teacher had not been very scientific and was merely repeating an old wives’ tale. The experience, however, had not been a failure, because it had helped me to learn a valuable lesson which would keep repeating itself over and over: Frogs are smarter than us.