2010 Vol 101.pdf (1.63mb) - Primate Society of Great Britain

EDITORIAL
This time last year, I commented on the media hoopla surrounding the
announcement of Ida, the now-world-famous ‘missing link’ (or
cercamonine adapid strepsirhine, as I suggested). A scientific response
subsequently appeared; Seiffert et al. (Nature 461: 1118-1121, 2009)
reported the discovery of a new African adapid (Afradapis longicristatus)
similar to Darwinius (Ida’s genus); the authors showed convincingly that
both of these Eocene genera belong to the strepsirhine side of the primate
clade. Not surprisingly, this did not make the front page of every daily
newspaper, nor did it generate any television news coverage. Thus, once
again, the non-Nature-reading general public are left with the mental
residue of misleading hyperbole without exposure to the more considered,
analysis-driven research.
Sadly, it would appear that the cycle is beginning again. Anderson et al.
(2010) sparked a similar media feeding-frenzy with their recent paper
entitled ‘Pan thanatology’.* The authors suggest that the behaviour of
captive chimpanzees during the period surrounding the death of a member
of the troop bears similarities to the reactions of humans to the death of a
relative. The new coverage, on the other hand, went straight to the
conclusion that chimpanzees have a human-like understanding of death;
they illustrated the story with an older photo, taken from National
Geographic, showing an unrelated group of chimpanzees. As with the Ida
debacle, the journal article raises legitimate scientific issues; the academic
debate has already begun on the Current Biology website
. The public-at-large, however, will
almost necessarily be excluded from these discussions. As a result,
‘conclusions’ reached entirely by the print and online media (‘Chimps
grieve when faced with death’, as reported in the Independent newspaper)
will be accepted as legitimate inferences. And, as with other media
favourites like aquatic ape ‘theory’, it means I’ll have to spend an inordinate
amount of my lecturing time have to ‘un-teach’ this to my students.
There may not be a simple solution to this frankly unacceptable state of
affairs. We are increasingly urged by our institutions and granting agencies
to make our work accessible to the general public. This brings us into
contact with reporters, who are under pressure to deliver content that can be
considered news (derived from the word ‘new’, implying an emphasis on
novelty) and that will generate interest at a glance. There is little room for
caveats, modifiers or conditions – as Ben Goldacre’s Guardian column
continually points out, the media filtering process often results in
simplifying to the point of deception. One colleague of mine provided
ample information on a recent journal article to the print media, only to
have the country in which the research took place misreported and to have
his name attached to entirely made-up quotes. Another had hours of
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