Seriously LiveScience, WTF?

Among the phrases that are most likely to make my hackles rise, "missing link" has to be among the most irritating. There is no good reason to continue to use it, the idea that evolution is a "chain" of progress being closely associated with the terminology, but this seems to be of little concern to some journalists. Even if we put accuracy aside, the phrase "missing link" is terrible because it has a sort of "half-joking" connotation to it, often being associated with bigfoot and cartoons rather than the remains of ancient humans.

Maybe they feel like they're trying to help by creating a "Top 10 Missing Links" feature that has appeared on the Yahoo! front page, but the scientific content of the LiveScience feature is so scanty that its value is questionable, at best. Today might be a slow news day, but that's no excuse to throw together a shoddy piece of "popular science" that does nothing to illuminate or educate.

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Any day is a good day for throwing together shoddy pieces of "science journalism" which neither inform nor educate!

Well, that's the impression I get from the evidence I see. . . . Sigh. :-(

Well, that's what you get from a graduate of NYU's science writing program.

Kidding.

As a side note, space.com, which owns LiveScience, is notorious among science writers for being something of a lowest common denominator, despite its partnership with Yahoo. Some of the writers there are okay, but a lot of them are hacks that really hype any sensationalism they can milk out of a story. Which, I suppose, is why Yahoo! likes them and they get disseminated so widely. Unfortunately the very worst of science journalism is what's usually most on display.

All else aside (like the idea that something that has been found isn't missing, or the "progression" idea), these aren't links - they're more branches than links.

Tiktaalik, yeah, that's a (no longer missing) link. That's a Top Tenner. P. bosei? If that's someone's idea of a "link" they probably spend a lot of time driving around cul-de-sacs trying to find the other street that they connect to.

I lol'd.

By Louis Bérubé (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

How are Cro-Magnons a missing link? They're modern humans. And they aren't even that old, especially since they've recently be redated.

The first person who commented asked for a short recap of missing links that could substitute for an education, and then was followed by a set of commenters who refuse to get an education because evolution just doesn't make sense. It is a waste of their time.

I would ridicule them but, that would be contra-framing and we are supposed to be nice to religious people.