How bad journalism promotes bad science

From The BBC...

US researchers have taken a mouse back in time some 500 million years by reversing the process of evolution.

By engineering its genetic blueprint, they have rebuilt a gene that was present in primitive animals.

The ancient gene later mutated and split, giving rise to a pair of genes that play a key role in brain development in modern mammals.

Those three sentences contain statements, asserted as fact, which are at best wild guesses, yet the journalist has no problem with that, and as quotes from the "scientist" show, they don't either. This ambivalence between hypothesis, theory and fact is exactly why so many today urge the emphasis that Evolution is just a theory.

"We are first to reconstruct an ancient gene," said co-researcher Petr Tvrdik of the University of Utah. "We have proven that from two specialised modern genes, we can reconstruct the ancient gene they split off from.

"It illuminates the mechanisms and processes that evolution uses, and tells us more about how Mother Nature engineers life."

No, they've only proven that they can screw up a mouse's genes and are stupid enough to think that that somehow proves something they cannot even prove ever happened in the first place. It would be the same as claiming to prove the existence of interstellar travel by jumping up on the curb.

The study, published in the academic journal Developmental Cell, involved a suite of genes involved in embryonic development.

The reason these studies are published in peer review journals is so that other scientists can analyze the study to see if there were any mistakes made. But when the media get involved it circumvents that process and allows bad science to remain unchallenged. I wonder if the reporter would go to another reporter for a second opinion about a medical condition rather than a doctor?

Posted by Danny Carlton at August 8, 2006 6:07 AM