FieldNotes: Only before the bicameral mind evolved could people fall for Bohannon's cheap stunts

Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking by Veronique Greenwood at Nautilus:

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. His position was marginal. “I don’t think the university was paying him on a regular basis,” recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years.....

The First Person Who Ever Saw Sperm Cells Collected Them From His Wife by Diane Kelly at Throb:

It’s a bright day in 1677, in the city of Delft, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is making love to his wife. But moments after he shudders with orgasm, he hurries out of bed to grab his microscope. After all, he’s not just spending time with his wife: he’s running an important scientific experiment at the request of the Royal Society in London. Leeuwenhoek has already gained quite a reputation at the Royal Society for his observations of microscopic things, and has—with the Society’s urging—looked at a lot of bodily fluids, including blood, milk, spit, and tears. This time, the plan is to see what’s inside semen. ....

No bones about it: sharks evolved cartilage for a reason by John Long at The Conversation:

Sharks are one of the oldest and least changed of all the living back-boned jawed creatures. But because their skeletons are made of cartilage much of their early fossil record is poor. Cartilage is a rubbery tissue that forms the framework for bones to ossify (harden) upon. It’s why babies have rubbery legs when they begin to walk, as the bones haven’t fully ossified around the cartilage cores. Our ears and noses have cartilage frameworks too, which lack bone, but still support the soft structures we hear and smell with. Cartilage doesn’t preserve as well as bones, so the early shark fossil records are based mostly on isolated scales and teeth.....

Viewing Octopus Choreography In Captivity by Barbara J. King at 13.7: Cosmos And Culture:

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, crafted in 2012 by a group of international scientists, states that octopuses — the only invertebrate animals mentioned — are conscious animals capable of intentional behavior. Books, articles and blog posts tout octopus intelligence. Recently, I spent the morning behind the scenes with an octopus at the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center — and, suddenly, the science of octopus cognition came to colorful life. I observed an enrichment session with the aquarium's common octopus, a representative of the largest octopus species in the Atlantic Ocean. I got to see a very active cephalopod, one whose chromatophores were active, too, so that I witnessed shade changes from red to dark red as the octopus telegraphed information about her behavioral state.....

Physiological Ads for the Modern Self by Michael Sappol at Circulating Now:

Fritz Kahn (1888–1968), a German-Jewish physician-author, was the first great exponent of the conceptual medical illustration—illustrations that go beyond the representation of human anatomy to visually explain processes that occur within the human body. His published works, aimed at a mass readership, contain thousands of imaginative images, produced by a cadre of talented commercial artists. In Kahn’s Das Leben des Menschen (5 vols., 1922–31), many of the illustrations copy the look of contem­porary advertisement, with display type, sub­headings, physically attractive models, etc. But they are not intended to sell a product: instead the human body, its structure and functions, are what’s advertised.......

Tiny Bubbles 2: The Indian Tradition by Rachel Laudan at Rachel Laudan blog:

A few months ago I posted about what seemed to me a big difference between modern Western cuisines and cuisines in other parts of the world, namely the widespread use of air in Western foods. I listed a variety of techniques for incorporating air, such as fermenting, pumping, steam trapped in doughs, whisking, etc. I argued that the enthusiasm for airy foods was no accident but the result of early modern nutritional theories that saw air as a food.....

Castration Affected Skeleton Of Famous Opera Singer Farinelli, Archaeologists Say by Kristina Killgrove at Forbes:

In a small city just above the heel of Italy’s boot, Carlo Broschi was born in 1705. Better known as Farinelli, his stage name, he became the greatest opera singer of the 18th century, performing all over Europe. This was the height of popularity of castrati, men who had been castrated as boys, before their voices changed. Farinelli is said to have had a rich soprano voice, with a range that would make any modern-day diva jealous......

Parallel Evolution of Color Pattern in the Anoles of the Lesser Antilles by Pavitra Muralidhar at Anole Annals:

Parallel evolution and convergent evolution are big themes within anole biology, so our lab was excited to discuss a new paper by Thorpe et al looking at these concepts in Lesser Antillean anoles. The paper focused on evidence for parallel evolution across seven small islands that contained both xeric and montane habitats with at least one species of anole split between the two habitats. Xeric habitats tend to occur along island coasts and are hotter, drier, and have less canopy cover, while montane habitats occur in the interior of islands and are cooler and wetter. There are many physical differences consistently found between the anoles associated with each type of habitat, even within a species; perhaps the most obvious examples are the repeated differences in skin color and pattern between habitats, beautifully illustrated in the first figure of the paper.....

The Cancellothyridids: A Modern Success Story by Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms:

As has been noted on this site more than once before, brachiopods are a group of animals probably more familiar to the student of palaeontology than of zoology. From the brief gloss that tends to be their only coverage in textbooks, one might be forgiven for thinking them all but inconsequential in the modern fauna. But where conditions suit them (usually sheltered locations where low levels of light and water flow favour their slow metabolisms over the higher energy requirements of bivalves), brachiopods can still be abundant, and even dominant.....

Pushing Pixels by Marcel LaFlamme at The New Inquiry:

This spring, the Curiosity rover made headlines when scientists reported new evidence of liquid water on the surface of Mars. By measuring the temperature and relative humidity in a crater over the course of a Martian year, the researchers found that salts in the soil could pull water vapor out of the atmosphere and form a brine during the overnight hours, before the moisture would evaporate again at sunrise. “We don’t really see the water,” the study’s lead author acknowledged in an interview. But other instances of seeing, like the dark markings that show up in orbital images and that appear to be water flowing downhill, were what motivated this latest set of measurements in the first place. On Mars, what we can see shapes what we can know......

Wolves at the Door by Jessa Gamble at The Last Word On Nothing:

Four years ago when I had a powerful encounter with a healthy wolf pack just meters from my home, I knew it was a quintessentially Northern experience. The million-odd square kilometers of the Northwest Territories are so sparsely populated by humans and so well-stocked with wolf prey that wild canids have fewer problems than their brethren to the south in Alberta. There, habitat loss is part of the issue, as with any threatened species, but the main determinant of wolf survival is whether or not we want them dead......

The Adapted Mind Of An Evolutionary Psychologist. A Conversation With Debra Lieberman by David Sloan Wilson at This View of Life:

Debra Lieberman is part of the 2nd generation of evolutionary psychologists. I’m proud to have introduced her to evolutionary thinking when she was an undergraduate student at Binghamton University, when I was still teaching a single course on Evolution and Human Behavior and before I helped to start EvoS, Binghamton University’s campus-wide evolutionary studies program. She obtained her PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby as her mentors. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Miami in Florida. Debra’s research is an excellent example of how evolutionary thinking can inform a detailed research program in cognitive psychology.....

Why Do Dogs Roll in Disgusting Stuff? by Patricia McConnell, Ph.D. at The Other End of the Leash:

Why do dogs roll in disgusting stuff? Ah, but of course, it’s not disgusting to them, right? But oh, the things with which dogs anoint themselves are usually awful to us humans, even with our lousy sense of smell. Here’s what I wrote about it in The Other End of the Leash: “If you haven’t smelled a dog who’s rolled in fox feces, then your life is slightly better than mine, because it’s a horrible smell, skunky and repulsive, and it clings to dog fur like a burr.” But why DO dogs roll in strong smelling scents? And why choose the scents that they do? Why not roll in mint or lavender or, for that matter, old food cartons left on the sidewalk? First, let’s look together at the guesses about why dogs roll in the first place......

Today's special topic - the second John Bohannon's so-called "sting":
 
I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How. by John Bohannon at io9
Tricked: The Ethical Slipperiness of Hoaxes by Hilda Bastian at Absolutely Maybe
The Ethics of Punking the Diet-Research Media Complex (and Millions of Readers) by Michelle N. Meyer at The Faculty Lounge
The Chocolate Warp Drive Diet: Did A Journalist Fool Millions Or Fool Himself? by Faye Flam at Forbes
Attempt to shame journalists with chocolate study is shameful by Rachel Ehrenberg at Culture Beaker
On the ethics of that "chocolate sting" study by Ashutosh Jogalekar at The Curious Wavefunction
Should the chocolate-diet sting study be retracted? And why the coverage doesn’t surprise a news watchdog by Gary Schwitzer at Retraction Watch
Chocolate-diet study publisher claims paper was actually rejected, only live “for some hours.” Email, however, says… by Alison McCook at Retraction Watch
3 Lessons from the Great Chocolate Study hoax by Marc Brazeau at Food and Farm Discussion Lab
Is it OK to generate a fake news story to make a point? No by Chris Lee at Ars Technica
A bogus study of chocolate and diets -- and the media that swallowed it whole by Michael Hiltzik at Los Angeles Times
Why A Journalist Scammed The Media Into Spreading Bad Chocolate Science by Maria Godoy at The Salt
Was it right to fool millions of people into thinking chocolate helps you lose weight? by Simon Oxenham at Neurobonkers
 
My take? This is the second deeply dishonest and unethical so-called "sting" by John Bohannon. He targets the low-hanging fruit, the obvious bad players, tricks them in an obvious way, then reports that everyone, including the good guys, does bad things, like falls for his tricks, although they don't. The first sting was targeting known predatory journals. Some accepted the manuscript. Good Open Access journals (e.g., PLOS ONE) rejected it. Toll-access journals were not even submitted to. What did Bohannon conclude and tout? That OA journals fall for bad manuscripts. Whoa! Not so fast! They didn't. They passed the silly test with flying colors.

Likewise with this sting. He targeted tabloids and HuffPo etc. A few of them published the report, as expected, written by mass-producing non-journalistic authors. Thousands of actual health and science journalists passed on the story. Bohannon's conclusion? Health reporting is incredulous. Real result: health reporters don't fall for silly Bohannon stunts. They passed the test with flying colors. Opposite of Bohannon's silly claims. Conclusion: Bohannon is a slight-of-hand trickster and an unethical liar.






And if that is not enough, more readings for later this weekend:

120,000 dead: half of the world's saiga die in less than a month by Jeremy Hance at Mongabay
Escaping the bench: one scientist’s transition away from research to communication by Ulli Hain at Science Extracted
"Sleeping beauties": why some studies only become influential after decades of obscurity by Brad Plumer at Vox
Salamander by Rosemary Mosco at Bird and Moon
Accidental Shipment of Anthrax Exposes Flaws in Safety Systems by Judy Stone at Forbes
Can We Cure Huntington’s Disease? by Ricki Lewis, PhD at DNA Science Blog
How the language you speak changes your view of the world by Panos Athanasopoulos at World Economic Forum Agenda
What Good Is Thinking About Death? by Julie Beck at The Atlantic
PC Mike Podcast: 7 Ways Facebook is Bad for your Mental Health by Jessica Bodford at Jessica Bodford Musings
Counting Animals Is a Sloppy Business by Emily Sohn at Nautilus
Do Horses Know What They Need to Eat? by Eleanor Kellon, VMD at Horse Collaborative
What Your Pet Reveals about You by Karen Schrock Simring at Scientific American Mind
Is the water you're drinking REALLY dinosaur pee? by Earth Touch at Earth Touch News Network
The Curse of the Horned Dinosaur Egg by Andrew Farke at The Integrative Paleontologists
Celebrating 268 years of clinical trials by Karen Anthony at Weekademia
Sawfish escape extinction through 'virgin births', scientists discover by Hannah Devlin at The Guardian
Robin Hanson on: "Most human behavior is signaling" by Julia Galef at Rationally Speaking
Error Is Not Simple by Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias
Honest signals in academia (or, why academics mostly can’t game the system and shouldn’t try) by Jeremy Fox at Dynamic Ecology
How Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Slow Food Theorists Got It All Wrong by Todd Kliman at Washingtonian
Philosophy of science 101 for ecologists: recommended readings by Jeremy Fox at Dynamic Ecology
Scientists find two new marsupial species that mate themselves to death by FIONA MACDONALD at ScienceAlert
Your Toothpaste May Be Loaded With Tiny Plastic Beads That Never Go Away by Julia Lurie at Mother Jones
Forget what you think you know about how memory works by Ben Locwin at Genetic Literacy Project
 




Previously in this series:
FieldNotes: a view to spotted horses in the morning
FieldNotes: The Word For World is Blue (or is it Gold?)
FieldNotes: Golden Mean, polite middle-ground, and optimal numbers of legs.
FieldNotes: speeding up and slowing down time
FieldNotes: from Captain Ahab to Jeff Goldblum, chasing the giants
FieldNotes: this is not your grandparents' neuroscience!
FieldNotes: Brontosaurus in, Food Babe out.
FieldNotes: Rogue Microwave Ovens Call Home
FieldNotes: Let the sleeping apes lie
FieldNotes: one thing leads to another leads to another
FieldNotes: Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
FieldNotes: do African horses do flehmen at the sight of Derby hats?
FieldNotes: How The Bird Got Its Beak
FieldNotes: When Snakes Had Legs...






Image: taken from Leeuwenhoek 1677.