UC Davis Press Release: Fail
Posted on March 19th, 2008 by blue collar scientistSome interesting research about the evolutionary development of the human skull is being reported by UC Davis. The researchers have concluded that random change - called genetic drift in the parlance - accounts for most of the differences between human and Neandertal skulls.
In their new study, Weaver and his colleagues crunched their fossil data using sophisticated mathematical models — and calculated that Neanderthals and modern humans split about 370,000 years ago. The estimate is very close to estimates derived by other researchers who have dated the split based on clues from ancient Neanderthal and modern-day human DNA sequences.
This is significant, because it tells us that rigorous study of morphological changes in fossils gives us dates in good agreement with that of DNA methods. The picture here is that two separate disciplines offer mutually reinforcing insights into human evolution over this time period.
But then the press release gets a little strange. The principal investigator, Tim Weaver, says:
A take-home message may be that we should reconsider the idea that all morphological (physical) changes are due to natural selection, and instead consider that some of them may be due to genetic drift. This may have interesting implications for our understanding of human evolution.
As a layperson with a pretty solid understanding of evolution, I’ve been suspicious at times of some scientists’ tendency to see natural selection where I felt1 some things might more simply be explained as neutral features - not selected against, not selected for, just arising randomly without any particular immediately adaptive traits. On the other hand, I’ve always been aware that I’m not the expert, so I’ve been inclined to trust the authorities and quell my own misgivings.
But despite my being predisposed to have sympathy with this conclusion, I have to admit that this is where the press release falls down into a morass of uselessness.
There is, almost certainly, a reason why Weaver thinks that his research indicates genetic drift, rather than selection, has been a major influence on the evolutionary development of the human skull. I’d bet that reason is a really good one, too. But the UC Davis release, as well as the PhysOrg coverage, are completely silent on what that reason might be. The closest they come to giving a reason for their belief is that they used “sophisticated mathematical models.”
I think it is problematic for a press release to pass up an opportunity to explain not only what we know, but how we know it. As has been often repeated, science is not a collection of purported facts. Science is a process for finding things out. A press release that gives such thin treatment of how a discovery was made, in favor of discussing what the discovery was, fails in its fundamental task of informing the general public.
The model behind this press release may be that laypeople are little people who live outside the University and can’t really understand what is being done, but might have a chance at understanding the conclusions. Or it could be that the public relations writer who wrote the press release2 couldn’t understand, or didn’t have time to understand, the reasons why the research led to the conclusions it did.
Whatever the reason, this press release crosses the line between “providing an elegant explanation suitable for laypersons,” and “dumbing down science.” This is an extreme example of dumbing down, because the release appears to make the dual assumption that not only will the public not understand the reasons - however well expressed - but they also will find the principles behind the mathematical model too “sophisticated” to understand.
I call this the Moses model - some bearded guy on a mountain conveying the results of his research on tablets of stone to the masses below. What is demanded of all researchers (and their PR collaborators) in this environment of deplorably poor science education is to provide compelling examples of the scientific method in action, and compelling explanations of their research.
Wondering if I could improve upon the press release, I went searching for the paper. I found it here; and for a measly ten bucks, I can purchase the privilege of being able to read the paper for two days. I’m not going to do that, because (a) the subject is outside my field of expertise, so I’m not likely to get as much out of it as someone more familiar with this field of research; and (b) I’m not actually working on an educational program on human-neandertal skull divergence. But I did read the abstract, and noticed the first line was this:
Recent research has shown that genetic drift may have produced many cranial differences between Neandertals and modern humans.
So, it turns out that this paper does not lead to the conclusion that human skull evolution was driven by genetic drift as opposed to natural selection; it’s the other way around: the conclusion led to the paper. The conclusion was raised as a possibility by previous research, and this paper provides a test of the hypothesis. If only I could be cited back to that previous research, perhaps that abstract would further illuminate me. But I don’t know where to look, because (as is largely customary in abstracts), there is no citation.
The abstract again:
Close correspondence between cranial and DNA-sequence results implies that both datasets largely, although not necessarily exclusively, reflect neutral divergence, causing them to track population history or phylogeny rather than the action of diversifying natural selection.
Now this is fine for an abstract - if you want to learn the reasons why this correspondence is evidence for genetic drift, you are supposed to continue on and read the paper.
But this kind of thing is not fine for a press release, which must provide an accessible explanation of why the scientists believe the things they are asserting. Without doing this, the press release is useless as a tool to increase public awareness or education about the subject. It is far more difficult to write a press release than a research paper abstract, and the system that generated this release has had a major malfunction. However obvious the conclusions are to the research team, they are not going to be obvious - nor necessarily even interesting - to a layperson reading the press release.
I have a psychic3 prediction to make: this paper is going to have virtually no penetration into the public awareness. But it could have had widespread penetration, and it could have been an important event in educating the general public about human evolution, if only some kind of explanation of the conclusions had been offered that the average person could not only understand, but embrace as interesting and logical. As it stands, UC Davis gives us only a dry set of assertions.
Fail.
- For no good reason, admittedly. [↩]
- Most press releases are not written by anyone on the research team; the research people provide information to the PR department of their university, and then it is largely out of their hands. [↩]
- Not! [↩]
Tags: anthropology, archaeology, biochemical, Charles C. Roseman, Chris B. Stringer, dating, Davis, divergence, DNA, evolution, genetic drift, genetics, human, morphology, neandertal, neanderthal, paleoanthropology, phenotype, PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, skull, Timothy D. Weaver, UC Davis, University of California, University of California Davis
March 19th, 2008 at 10:03 am
The theory presented in the paper itself–that natural selection is not always the driving force behind specisation–is an intruiging one, and may have important consequences for divergence models.
But I agree with you that the press release was botched. I like your “Moses Model” term. I might have to start using that. :-) I’ve stopped reading press releases about paleontology, and I just read about new discoveries on science blogs like yours or Brian’s. They’re much more in-depth. The media has to hire some trained scientists who can also write well. The writer must be able to take a complex idea (it’s actually that complex) and simply reword it, choosing those words carefully, to get the full breadth of the concept to be understandable to the “unwashed” masses.
And those masses are a lot more knowledgable, and eager to learn, than the media seems to think. Every time I’ve given a talk at the museum or a high school or wherever, people GET it, and I’m not dumbing anything down. With the right language, you can get people to understand how revolutionary it is that Velociraptor might be secondarily flightless. It’s not a hard concept, but the media doesn’t give the public any credit.
Also, I’m just appalled that scientific papers are not free access except for a few key places. BioOne is my nemesis.
March 19th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
I think you’re being a little tough on my colleague Claudia. Not every science story needs to be a full-blown press release. Most publications produce a mix of stories of different lengths, features, short stories and briefs, and there’s room for all these.
The original point of a press release, after all, is to encourage other people to write about the story — so if a journalist picks up my 250 word tip and then talks to the researcher and writes a longer, more in-depth piece about it, that’s just fine with me.
I do agree that lay audiences can understand the science if you explain it well enough. But you do have to write for the audience, and you do have to make it punchy enough for them to read it in the first place. The most important thing is to tell them why they should care about it enough to read the story in the first place.
Andy Fell
UC Davis News Service
March 19th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
That’s where the headline comes in, right? Like:
“Fossils in Kenya Challenge Linear Evolution?” Or “Kenyan archaeologist’s findings challenge Darwinian evolutionary theory?”
I think it would be possible…just maybe to not grab the audience with a cheap, false headline like that. Perhaps this would do better:
“Two species of early man co-existed” or “Kenyan archaeologist’s find supports ‘branching bush’ view of human evolution.”
It’s a matter of respecting the science, but more than that, understanding it. I have very little faith in the journalists who report on paleo finds, anthropological or otherwise. As many of my fellow science bloggers have lamented, the recent tiny pterosaur find from China was called a “dinosaur” by many media outlets.
Unacceptable! It takes only a Google search to understand that pterosaurs are NOT dinosaurs. It would be like calling a lizard a “crocodile.” How hard is it to get a little thing like that right? “Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs.” Revolutionary, I know!
Similarly, it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to craft a headline that does not insult the science it claims to report on, and it doesn’t take a genius to explain to a lay audience that genetic drift is important in advancing our view of natural selection. It takes very little effort to educate people, but if you dumb something down to the point where it becomes untrue, or misrepresents the finding, then you’re hindering the public’s perception of whatever is being reported on.
Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs, and they’re not related to birds, either. People get that idea from newspapers and news websites, not from me, and not from actual paleontologists, and I can tell you that they don’t get that idea from the press releases, either.
March 19th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Remember, though, that at newspapers headlines are not written by the person who wrote the story but by a completely different editor, whose #1 job is to make people pick up a newspaper and buy it. Sometimes the results are clever, and sometimes they are cringemaking.
March 19th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Andy,
Perhaps I am being a bit tough, but I believe I am not wrong. The central message here is that press releases must offer insights into scientific process and must provide reasons for believing the discoveries the research asserts, and that this is fundamental. I hear you when you say, “you do have to write for the audience, and you do have to make it punchy enough for them to read it in the first place;” I spend a large part of my workday converting research into units interesting to and understandable by lay groups of various demographics, and I fully embrace what you say there!
But you are not hearing me: I say that you cannot have a punchy release if it fails to offer insights into the research. There are two problems: One is that this kind of story is alienating and seems irrelevant to a public audience. As I’m sure you know, the press release the institution writes is usually going to be the story the media outlet prints or broadcasts; it is rare for a reporter to talk to the researcher. The second problem is that a press release like this is insufficiently backgrounded to allow a reporter to write a timely, efficient story even if they do talk to the researcher. I spend some of my workday backgrounding reporters on other peoples’ astrophysics research, so I’m not unaware of how reporters approach their stories.
The institutional model for press releases like this is something along the lines of “let’s get some attention,” with the oft-heard mantra that there is no such thing as bad publicity. There is, and this kind of press release promotes that bad publicity - public annoyance at the arrogance of scientists and the institutions that employ them. I’m advocating reform, I’m saying the model is broken, and I’m not expecting you or Claudia to be happy about what I’m saying.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
“The second problem is that a press release like this is insufficiently backgrounded to allow a reporter to write a timely, efficient story even if they do talk to the researcher.”
I’ve been able to find two news stories online that go beyond the press release. Both quote Erik Trinkaus on backgrounding.
One quotes Trinkaus trying to explain how the research shows that genetic drift, not selection, was the important driver of skull evolution, with little success according to the straw poll I just conducted on a roomful of people. Both bury the information about genetic drift behind the craniometry-molecular dating agreement.
I’d have loved for this story to spur 100 good articles, but so far, we’ve only got one article that is sort of OK….
March 21st, 2008 at 1:43 pm
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