On a newsgroup that shall remain Nameless, one of the regulars, Bill Reich, just heard on the History Channel:
Smilodon is the ancestor of all the modern big cats.
Oy!
So this thread is for egregiously* wrong statements made on erstwhile factual television shows. Please state where you heard it, and if possible the show name and episode.
* Egregiously. Look it up. A cool and useful word.
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I hope everyone has been enjoying my write-ups of Inside Nature's Giants (ING), series 2 (for comments on episode 1 go here, and for thoughts on episode 2 go here). Time to look at ep 3: the big cat one.
Given that big cats are more popular (among the general populace) than are either sharks or…
A very lion-like Smilodon, from Ernest Ingersoll's The Life of Animals (1907).
For decades after its discovery the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis was depicted as little more than a lion with a short tail and long fangs. Given its size and habits as a large carnivore the connection appeared…
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There had always been well-written…
One of Charles R. Knight's paintings of Smilodon fatalis, this one menacing a giant sloth stuck in tar (off panel).
There are few fossil mammals that are as impressive as the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis, but despite it's fearsome dentition some recent reports have suggested it was more of…
Does local news count? The local Health Beat reporter has never met an alt-med practice she did not love... and the justifications are egregiously wrong... (I certainly hope you are underestimating your readership if you think we had to look that up!)
On an episode of Radiolab (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/03/14), host Robert Krulwich said something along the lines of "if you believe in the theory of evolution, you believe that chimpanzees are our ancestors" and I was all like "whaaaaa?"
BBC's "League of Gentlemen"
It appears that one of the qualifications to be a Canadian journalist is to not have a clue about the difference between bacteria and viruses. As in: "the outbreak of MRSA virus" or "the recent upsurge in Tuberculosis virus".I don't know whether this is just a Canadian thing or whether it's more widespread, but I see it All the Fzzking Time in our newspapers, and it drives me nuts!
Everytime the space shuttle goes into low-earth orbit some news reporter talks about its mission into outer space...
I've been reading an otherwise good book about Darwin and his barnacles which claims that cholera is caused by a bacillus, and on the same page by a virus. I guess getting the shape of the bacterium correct was just good luck.
Oh, and this is very unfair, but I was watching Life on Earth recently, and David Attenborough talks about the Burgess Shales and the weird forms of life in them, whilst holding a piece of rock with Hallucegenia drawn on it. Of course, we now know it's drawn the wrong way round. As I wrote, unfair. But doesn't stop me shouting "turn it over!" at the screen.
CNN subtitle in 2003, reporting on the re-entry breakup of the Shuttle Columbia: "Shuttle travelling nearly 18 times the speed of light."
Further to comment #4, British journalists are the same: MRSA is a "virus", malaria is caused by "a bacteria (sic)".
A friend of mine has a, in the meantime large, data collection of incorrect claims made in all forms of the media about Galileo that was started by the following case. The German commercial television channel has a programme called Galileo that used to be a popular science programme; it has now degenerated to a bizarre "knowledge" junk heap. On this programme they claimed that Galileo was the first to show that the earth is a sphere!
Yikes; that Smilodon error is pretty bad. Even good documentaries aren't above making some egregious errors, though. In the Life of Mammals series, Attenborough says that marmosets & tamarins are the most "primitive" (I hate that word) of the monkeys. The truth is that they have a number of derived features and were probably once a bit larger; the fact that they nearly always have twins is a sign that they body size shrunk, and when it did the primates could no longer give birth to one large baby (having smaller twins being the consequence of the decrease in body size).
TV program about the early earth. Statement made that "Photosynthesis produces oxygen out of carbon dioxide." Wrong, the oxygen comes from water. Same or similar program showed a three foot long scorpion moulting out in air. I doubt that an arthropod that size could moult without the support of water.
I've been reading an otherwise good book about Darwin and his barnacles which claims that cholera is caused by a bacillus, and on the same page by a virus.
That would be Darwin and the Barnacle, and argh but that blooper hit me between the eyes. But otherwise, yes: it's a fascinating book, for the portrait of Darwin at home, in the years between Beagle and the publication of OoS.
How about just the History Channel in general. I have a degree in history and continue to read voraciously on all sorts of history and pre-history. The History Channel is about as accurate as Fox News and has the same political leanings.
Well, this one is not strictly science, more technology, but yesterday I heard a CBC news reporter say that the electricity was turned off in a certain (flooded) area because of "concerns about an electrical shortage"
I seem to remember that "virus" used to be the all-general term that applied to any "agent that causes infectious disease." Since viruses per se weren't discovered till 1892, Darwin using the term virus in connection with the cholera bacillus, at the time, wasn't incorrect.
Tonight on Catalyst (science magazine on the ABC for you non-Australia dwellers), a biochemical engineer said something like "Crustaceans, including crabs and insects".
My wife and I looked at each other... then she said "it's ok, all the biologists in the lab will be ribbing him for that for weeks..."
In fact, here it is, in the transcript of the segment:
"Associate Professor John Foster: Crustacea such as crabs and insects have, contrary to us, what's called an exoskeleton, so the the crab shell is not just an enclosing body, it actually acts as a support mechanism so the flesh inside the muscles, the tissue etc, actually binds to the inside of the skeleton itself."
Perhaps the script had commas after 'crabs' and 'insects' that Prof Foster neglected to pronounce?