The Princeton Guide to Evolution

VIII.15

Evolution and the Media

Carl Zimmer

OUTLINE

1. Evolution and the birth of modern science communication

2. Evolution and creationism: The dangers of false balance

3. Evolution and the rise of new media

4. The Darwinius affair: A cautionary tale

5. Conclusion

On March 28, 1860, the New York Times ran a very long article on a newly published book called On the Origin of Species. The Times explained that the dominant explanation for life’s staggering diversity at the time was the independent creation of every species on earth. “Meanwhile,” the anonymous author wrote, “Mr. DARWIN, as the fruit of a quarter of a century of patient observation and experiment, throws out, in a book whose title has by this time become familiar to the reading public, a series of arguments and inferences so revolutionary as, if established, to necessitate a radical reconstruction of the fundamental doctrines of natural history.”

Today, some 150 years later, evolutionary biologists are continuing to reconstruct natural history, and journalists are still documenting that reconstruction. Each week brings a flood of reports on new research into evolution, ranging from fossil dinosaurs to the emergence of new strains of viruses to evolutionary clues embedded in the human genome. The New York Times continues to publish articles about evolution, as do many other newspapers and magazines. But reports on evolution can also take many new forms that were inconceivable in Darwin’s day. They can be the subject of television shows, blogs, podcasts, and tweets. This chapter examines the ways in which media has treated evolution over the past four decades, and the rapid changes currently unfolding. There is not space, however, to consider the fascinating relationship of evolution and the media in earlier periods of history (see, e.g., Browne 2001 and Larson 1998).

1. EVOLUTION AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

To understand the relationship between evolution and the media, it helps to take an evolutionary perspective. The journalistic coverage of evolution as we know it today began to take shape in the 1970s. Newspapers, especially in the United States, were growing rapidly at the time and developing new features to attract readers. Many newspapers hired reporters who specialized in science, and many science writers focused much of their attention on evolutionary biology. For example, Boyce Rensberger, a science writer for the New York Times, wrote a string of stories about evolution in the 1970s. In one typical Rensberger article (April 12, 1975), titled “East Africa Fossils Suggest That Man Is a Million Years Older Than He Thinks,” he described the discovery of a 3-million-year-old fossil of a hitherto-unknown species of hominin, Australopithecus afarensis.

Four years later, the Times founded a weekly section dedicated to science. It was the first science section ever included in an American newspaper, but in the next few years, many other newspapers followed suit. A number of science magazines were also launched. Old standards like Scientific American were joined by start-ups such as Discover and Omni. All these new publications gave special attention to evolution.

One reason for this focus was that evolutionary biology itself had entered an exciting period of renewal, and so there were many stories for reporters to write about. New fossils like A. afarensis provided paleontologists with fresh insights into human evolution. Dinosaurs, which had long been considered sluggish and slumped, received a makeover. During the 1970s, the Yale paleontologist John Ostrom oversaw the reconstruction of dinosaurs as fast-running, warm-blooded creatures—an upgrade from Godzilla to Jurassic Park.

Geologists were also adding to evolution’s cinematic appeal. In the late 1970s Walter Alvarez of the University of California at Berkeley and his colleagues discovered clues that an asteroid smashed into earth 65 million years ago. That collision happened to coincide with the end of the Cretaceous period, a time of mass extinctions that claimed the dinosaurs Ostrom was rehabilitating. Alvarez made a radical connection between the impact and the mass extinctions. Mass extinctions had long been thought to stretch across millions of years, caused by slow-moving processes such as gradual sea level change. Alvarez and his colleagues offered a vision of sudden disaster: the asteroid impact threw dust and rock high into the atmosphere, causing a global environmental catastrophe—darkness for months, acid rain, global warming, and more. In a geological flash, millions of species became extinct.

Alvarez was arguing for a catastrophic mode of evolution. To understand evolution 65 million years ago, we could not simply extrapolate back from the small, incremental changes natural selection produces today from one generation to the next. As a result, some scientists argued, the end-Cretaceous extinctions did not fit into the framework of the Modern Synthesis. The Modern Synthesis—an integration of genetics, paleontology, ecology, and other branches of biology—explained life predominantly as the result of natural selection operating on small differences among individuals over vast periods of time.

Challenges to the Modern Synthesis came from studies not just on mass extinctions but on more tranquil periods of the fossil record. Paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould argued that the fossil record revealed a pattern of stasis and change, a pattern they dubbed punctuated equilibria: species remained stable for millions of years, and new species rapidly branched off in just thousands of years. Eldredge and Gould argued that this pattern of evolution allowed selection to take place not just between individuals but perhaps also between species.

Science writers chronicled these challenges to the Modern Synthesis, but they also reported on other scientists who were expanding its scope. In 1976 the British zoologist Richard Dawkins, building on the work in the 1960s of George Williams and William Hamilton, published The Selfish Gene. Dawkins argued that evolution was best understood from a gene-centered perspective. The Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson undertook a similar project, interpreting a vast range of behaviors—from the selfless work of sterile worker bees to the bloodshed of human warfare—as strategies for genes to get themselves replicated. In 1975 he unveiled his synthesis in the book Sociobiology. Rensberger (May 28, 1975) reported its publication on the front page of the New York Times in his article “Sociobiology: Updating Darwin on Behavior.”

As evolution was appearing on the front pages of newspapers, science programming was also emerging on television. In 1974, for example, the Public Broadcasting Service developed the Nova series. New research on evolution figured prominently in these shows as well. In his 1980 series Cosmos, Carl Sagan discussed the basic principles of evolution, along with new ideas about the role of comets and other impacts on the history of life. And in 1981, Walter Cronkite, having just retired from his nightly television news show, hosted a series of science shows called Cronkite’s Universe. On one episode his guests were Donald Johanson—one of the discoverers of A. afarensis—and the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey. Johanson and Leakey engaged in a heated debate about the place of A. afarensis in human evolution. Johanson believed it was on the line that led to Homo sapiens, while Leakey considered it a side branch. During the program, Johanson held up a chart showing his version of hominin phylogeny. Next to it was a blank space where he asked Leakey to draw his hypothesis. Instead, Leakey drew an X through Johanson’s tree. In its place, he drew a large question mark (Wilford 2011).

Evolutionary biologists debated on television, and they also debated in print. As Dawkins and Wilson garnered attention for their expansion of the Modern Synthesis, Stephen Jay Gould and other scientists launched scathing criticisms, arguing that adaptationists ascribed far too much power to natural selection. They condemned sociobiology as “just-so stories”—plausible-sounding tales of adaptation rather than carefully constructed and tested hypotheses. Most of Gould’s attacks took place not in the pages of scientific journals but in popular publications such as Natural History and the New York Review of Books. Dawkins, Wilson, and others responded in kind, and the debate gave rise to a number of hugely popular books, such as Gould’s Wonderful Life (1998) and Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker (1996).

2. EVOLUTION AND CREATIONISM: THE DANGERS OF FALSE BALANCE

In December 1981 a number of the top science journalists in the United States converged on Little Rock, Arkansas, to cover a story about evolution. The story did not concern a new fossil, or a new hypothesis about speciation, but a trial. Earlier that year, the Arkansas legislature had passed a law requiring that public school teachers present “creation science” alongside evolution in their biology classes. A group of teachers and religious figures filed a lawsuit challenging the law as an unconstitutional promotion of religion.

Of all the sciences, evolutionary biology attracts an unmatched amount of social controversy. Organized religious opposition to the teaching of evolution in the United States first emerged in the 1920s, leading to the famous Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925. Conflicts over the teaching of evolution have continued to break out in the decades since then. The 1981 case McLean v. Arkansas led to the banning of “creation science” from classrooms. But it did not stop the conflict over the teaching of evolution. Journalists have continued to report on the attempts of some state and local school board members to question the validity of evolution and to promote creationism in its various forms. (See chapter VIII.14 for more on the history of creationism in the United States.)

Much of the coverage of evolution found in newspapers, magazines, and television news programs addresses these social conflicts, rather than the science of evolution itself. This bias is an unfortunate result of the nature of modern journalism: editors and journalists seek easily explained conflicts between people. Another weakness in much modern journalism is a craving for false balance. If one side in court trial says that evolution is true, then a journalist may feel obligated to unquestioningly quote someone from the other side. This “he said, she said” form of journalism can be legitimate in political reporting, but it is unacceptable in science reporting. It implicitly gives equal credibility to opposing sides, even if one side has no science whatsoever to back up its case. False balance promotes the mistaken impression that evolution is controversial within the scientific community, rather than the foundation of modern biology.

3. EVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF NEW MEDIA

In some ways, the relationship between evolution and the media has changed little since the 1970s. Public television and cable stations periodically air shows dealing with paleontology and human origins. Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson continue to write best-selling books, and they have been joined by many talented younger evolutionary biologists, such as Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Olivia Judson, Sean Carroll, and Neil Shubin. Evolution still inspires abundant journalism in newspapers and magazines. And journalists continue to cover controversies over evolution, including the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case and Louisiana’s 2008 law protecting creationist science teachers in the name of “academic freedom.”

Yet tremendous changes are under way. People are rapidly moving to the Internet to learn about science, including evolution.

Evolution first went online in the 1990s, when a few evolutionary biologists and evolution aficionados began to set up online discussion groups such as the one at www.talk.origins.org. They posted comments about new advances in evolutionary biology and the attempts of creationists to block the teaching of evolution. Later these sites also hosted lists of frequently asked questions about evolution, such as, “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”

Talk.origins and other evolution discussion groups were founded at a time when few people outside universities had even heard of the Internet. As the number of Internet users grew exponentially, programmers invented more powerful ways to post information online. Blogs allowed people to self-publish their writing; they also made it possible to post podcasts, video, and other media. Today, thanks to the Internet, far more biologists are regularly writing about evolution than ever before (Goldstein 2009).

As blogs have bloomed, the older venues for news on evolution have struggled. A number of science magazines launched in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Omni and Science 80, eventually folded. Science coverage in newspapers suffered in the 1990s. In 1989, a total of 95 newspapers ran science sections. By 2013 that number had shrunk to just 19. Those shuttered science sections were the victims of an industry-wide blight. Newspapers were being squeezed for greater profits, even as their readerships were declining. They offered their senior staff buyouts to reduce labor costs. A number of the science writers who had been part of the field’s first efflorescence left the business.

Many newspapers and magazines now see the Internet as an essential part of their future. The New York Times, for example, now has a daily circulation of about 1.5 million readers but receives about 25 million unique visits a month to its website. The news on its site also radiates outward across the World Wide Web as people comment on it in blogs and forums.

These huge changes in readership are changing the way evolution and other branches of science are reported. The print edition of the New York Times still includes a science section every Tuesday, but it also offers many untraditional kinds of coverage of evolution. For example, the New York Times has published blog posts by evolutionary biologists about their work, and offers podcasts and even short videos about evolution. In 2009 it posted The Origin in an online form, with annotations from some of the world’s leading scientists.

But the New York Times and other publications have to compete with scientists themselves to present evolution to the public. The University of California, Berkeley, has set up a major website called Understanding Evolution (evolution.berkeley.edu), which presents not only the basic concepts of evolution but also new scientific developments. In 2009, Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, established a blog called Creaturecast about animal evolution (creaturecast.org), where he and his co-bloggers regularly publish innovative videos. One episode explains how single-celled organisms made the evolutionary transition to multicellularity, for example. The film is a stop-action animation of purple modeling clay, which morphs into cells, which then join together into bodies. The video is at once charming and surprisingly enlightening. And most important, it was something no one would have imagined a few years earlier.

4. THE DARWINIUS AFFAIR: A CAUTIONARY TALE

Creative efforts such as Creaturecast inspire hope for the future of evolution and the media, but they should not inspire a blind optimism. The Internet is also home to a great deal of misinformation about evolution, especially on creationist sites. Some of these sites are relatively obvious, such as Creation Safaris (creationsafaris.com). Other sites cloak their creationism. A site with the harmless-sounding name All About Science (www.allaboutscience.org) has a long page titled “Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.” It takes a bit of snooping around to discover that All About Science is produced by a group called AllAboutGod.com.

Too often, journalists for major media provide poor information about evolution online. In fact, the very nature of twenty-first century media fosters bad reporting on evolution. One of the most instructive events took place in May 2009, when journalists reported on the unveiling of a new fossil of a primate dubbed Darwinius masilae.

The unveiling was unique in the annals of paleontology. At the American Museum of Natural History, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other luminaries gazed at the slab preserving a 47-million-year-old specimen (known as Ida, named after the daughter of one of the paleontologists who described the fossil). Minutes before the press conference was to commence, the electronic journal PLoS ONE published a paper about the fossil. Some of the paper’s authors, speaking at the press conference, described the fossil as both the holy grail of paleontology and the lost ark of archeology.

The scientists were not the only ones to speak that morning. Nancy Dubuc, an executive at the History Channel, said that the fossil “promised to change everything that we thought we understood about the origins of human life” (Pilkington 2009). Why was Dubuc there? Because the unveiling of Darwinius was actually a television phenomenon, years in the making.

Television producers had started putting together a big-budget show about Darwinius even as the scientists were analyzing the fossil and writing up their results. The documentary’s main message was also the chief argument in the PLoS ONE paper: Darwinius belonged to the lineage that led to monkeys, apes, and humans. As a result, it illuminated how our ancestors diverged from more distantly related primates, such as lemurs. As the air date for the documentary approached, the History Channel cranked up a massive publicity machine. A trade book was rushed into print; ads appeared; YouTube videos spread like viruses. The History Channel set up an elaborate website called Revealing the Link (revealingthelink.com). It featured hyperbolic claims from the scientists, such as “When our results are published, it will be just like an asteroid hitting the Earth.”

As press manipulation, the strategy worked well. Newspapers, magazines, and even television news programs ran stories about Darwinius on their websites on the day of its grand unveiling. Few of them would have ever considered covering the discovery of an Eocene primate, it’s safe to say, without the elaborate publicity. Unfortunately, most reporters simply relayed hyperbolic quotes from their sources. They also demonstrated some deep misunderstandings about evolution. “Fossil is evolution’s missing link,” announced the Sun, falling prey to the common misbelief that paleontologists could ever determine our direct ancestors (Soodin 2009). (In fact, paleontologists compare related species to determine the pattern by which new traits emerged in different lineages.)

Given the upheavals in the media these days, it’s not surprising that the press was so swayed by the Darwinius publicity machine. The number of skilled science writers who can report a story like this one with the proper skepticism is dwindling. And all media organizations are racing to be the first to get news online.

A few veteran journalists tried to obtain the paper to show it to other experts on fossil primates to get their opinion on its importance, but they were thwarted both by PLoS ONE and the authors. Ann Gibbons, a correspondent for Science, finally got her hands on the paper the weekend before the press conference, but only after signing a nondisclosure agreement with the television company that produced the Darwinius documentary. Gibbons promised not to show the paper to anyone before the press conference (Zimmer 2009).

The first wave of articles about Darwinius was based entirely on the press conference and claims from the scientists who had published the paper. Days later, Gibbons and a handful of other science writers published articles that offered a broad look at Darwinius, rather than the breathless press conference coverage that dominated the news. Nearly all the other experts reporters contacted thought the fossil was impressive but that the claims of its kinship with humans unjustified. “This hypothesis now lies well outside the scientific mainstream, and the discovery and description of Ida have done little to rehabilitate it,” wrote Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the September 2009 issue of American Scientist.

In October 2009, five months after the Darwinius circus had folded its tents and moved on, paleontologists Erik Seiffert and colleagues published an important new paper on early primate evolution. They described another early primate fossil, called Afradapis, and compared its anatomy with that of Darwinius and a wide range of other primate fossils. Their analysis placed Darwinius on the branch that led to lemurs, not to us. The reaction from the press for this paper was a stark contrast to the pandemonium that greeted Darwinius in May. Very few newspapers and other publications even mentioned the new study. Perhaps if there had been a big-budget documentary on Afradapis, things might have been different.

5. CONCLUSION

Information about evolution is now available in a staggering range of forms. But readers, listeners, and viewers cannot simply assume that everything they encounter is accurate. People must learn to think critically about what they read, watch, and listen, and should also strive to develop a strong understanding of the basic principles of evolutionary theory. They can also tap into the collective wisdom of the blogosphere. And finally, they should resist the rapid-fire allure of the Internet. After all, the scientific process does not run on a 24-hour-a-day news cycle. It takes years for scientists to gather data and present hypotheses, and for other scientists to test them. Journalism, it is often said, is the first draft of history. In the history of evolutionary biology, that first draft is sometimes wrong.