Stop Saying Humans Are Like ‘Slowly Boiling Frogs’

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CREDIT: Shutterstock

Even though people keep using the famous simile — “the fatally slow human response to climate change makes us like a slowly boiling frog” — it is not quite right.

Since last Wednesday was Frog Jumping Day, it seems like a good time to explain why this cliché should be retired.

As Wikipedia puts it, “German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.” Other 19th Century studies appeared to have different results, but modern experiments (!) show that frogs with brains are in fact smart enough to leap out of water as it is heated up.

James Fallows of The Atlantic, who holds the world record for boiling frog posts, had his own update last week, “The Boiled-Frog Watch Returns.” Fallows posts this excerpt from the 1888 publication, Studies from the Biological Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University:

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Fallows argues that while the “metaphor is flat wrong,” that is just a “minor problem. The major problem is that it is such a damned cliché.” He links to this 2013 essay, “Can we please throw the boiling frog metaphor into some boiling water?”

So now you can decide to drop the cliché because it isn’t accurate or because it is a cliché. If you insist upon using it, then you should probably modify it….

We are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. As I’ve said before, since we are the only species that gets to name all the species, we can call ourselves “wise” twice.

But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability — despite repeated warnings by scientists — we should probably drop one of the “sapiens” and provisionally put the other one in quotes. We would then be Homo “sapiens” sapiens — at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from ourselves.

If humans destroy a livable climate — which means “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse” — and are renamed just plain Homo, then in fact we will have demonstrated we are dumber than frogs.

At that point, we will be brainless frogs.

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CREDIT: Tom Toles (reprinted from the with permission)

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