X-Men may be closer than you think | CNET News.com
I suspect all science writers have had the unhappy experience sooner or later of busting their butts to translate tough science into clear writing, only to have a headline writer top it off with a load of nonsense.
For more on the unhappy collision between Darwin and X-men see Chris Mooney here.
(Fraternal hat tip)
- Log in to post comments
More like this
A couple readers have emailed me asking what I think of the recent Nature article on blogs by scientists. I agree with Revere that it's great that Nature (and specifically, Nature reporter Declan Butler) is paying such close attention to blogs in science. The top 50 list they provide is a good…
Now this one should start some really good arguments in the comments!
6 Pop Culture Visionaries Who Get Too Much Credit
Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek)
George Lucas (Star Wars)
Stan Lee (X Men, and really the whole Marvel Comics shebang)
Who Actually Deserves the Credit:
While Stan Lee and Jack Kirby…
As if things weren't contentious enough around here already, I've got another subject for general discussion that I'm sure will lead to some debate. In science there has long been a tradition of trying to engage the public, whether it be through public debates/lectures, books, etc. As Stephen Jay…
There is something about Richard Dawkins that seems to drive otherwise intelligent people completely out of their minds. Dawkins writes a book called The Selfish Gene, and some scholarly critics actually go after him on the grounds that genes can not be selfish. Then he wrote The God Delusion, a…
And how much do you want to bet that the headline writer was pushed by some editor who wanted to make some idiot tie-in to the next X-Men movie? (Sorry: long experience with moron newspaper editors leaves me twitchy.)
That's not the worst, of course. I have seen some much more ridiculous ones.
While I really like Chris Mooney's blog that article bugged me.
I know little about Steven J Gould personally, except he wrote some fun essays in Natural History. Mooney blames Gould for a viewpoint that Mooney himself, in the very article, shows Gould did NOT hold, and specifically quotes him as denying. It came across as if Mooney got paid to rip Gould.
Funnily enough, I've always thought of X-Men and other superhero comics as good examples of what it would be like to live in a creationist universe. Sudden appearance of new and completely different creatures, vast leaps in genetic information in a single generation, an idea of "direction" in the development of species, all creationist ideas. Of course, that's because superhero universes, like all fictional worlds, actually do have creators.
Mooney is a good writer, I enjoy reading his stuff. But in the article, he writes "... the vast majority of mutations tend to be very harmful to organisms." Aren't neutral mutations far more common than harmful or beneficial ones?