Tip of the hat to
Answers in Genesis BUSTED!: Told You So.
AIGB says:
quote:
A few days ago I blogged on the recent fossil find, dubbed 'Ida', sensationalized in the media as our earliest fossil ancestor. I urged caution about this fossil, stating that it was still very contentious amongst experts as to whether Adapids (the primate group to which Ida belongs) are ancestral to anthropoid (humanlike) monkeys.
Wouldn't you know it? A recent letter to Nature confirmed my suspicions:
AIGB quotes
Nature:
quote:
...in the paper the authors explicitly state that Darwinius masillae could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates evolved, but we are not advocating this here, nor do we consider either Darwinius or adapoids to be anthropoids. The authors also refrain from claiming that the fossil changes our understanding of primate evolution.
But the circumstances surrounding the paper’s publication were anything but normal. Before the paper had even been submitted to the journal, Atlantic, a production company based in New York, had commissioned a television documentary and an accompanying book about the find. Just a week after the paper appeared, the book has been published and the documentary has been aired on the History Channel in the United States, as well as Britain’s BBC and Norway’s NRK. Both book and documentary include the the suggestive words ‘The Link’ in their titles. A press release associated with the New York press conference at which the fossil was first officially described claimed that the fossil represents revolutionary changes in understanding. The History Channel website calls the find a human ancestor, and the BBC website describes it as our earliest ancestor.
To be fair, the authors’ claims at the press conference were appropriately measured. Nonetheless, the researchers were fully involved in the documentaries and the media campaign, which associate them with a drastic misrepresentation of their research.
The
Nature editorial is part way down the page
here. I'd like to quote the whole thing, but that probably wouldn't be proper. The closing paragraph:
quote:
In principle, there is no reason why science should not be accompanied by highly proactive publicity machines. But in practice, such arrangements introduce conflicting incentives that can all too easily undermine the process of the assessment and communication of science.
See the link content for the whole editorial.
Moose
Edited by Minnemooseus, : Add first quote and change ID.
Edited by Minnemooseus, : Missed two extra line feeds.
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