Rat-astic science journalism
In my column last week, I complained (only slightly gratuitously) about the way science journalists write about animal experiments. No, this wasn’t a PETA screed. What bugged me about Nicholas Wade’s interesting article in the New York Times about a long-term Russian experiment in breeding tame animals was the way he wanted to pull some kind of human lesson out of what was specifically animal research.
Starting in the 1950s, Russian researchers had been breeding two sets of rats (as well as foxes and some other animals) — one pool was bred for friendliness to humans, the other for hostility. Over just a few generations, the researchers had some extremely tame and untame rats. This is fascinating because it shows that the process of “taming” domestic animals or farm animals might not be nearly as arduous as was once believed. But like many science journalists, Wade couldn’t just end his article with this animal-related discovery. He had to raise the question of what this meant for humans — could we be tamed in a few generations? Are we already tamed?
Those questions are interesting, to be sure. But they are out of the scope of this study. It leads readers astray to imply that somehow this study could be used to examine an idea as ill-defined as “human tameness.” I don’t mean to single out Wade, who has written a good story. Like many science journalists, including myself, he’s struggling to engage readers who would rather read about the Hezbollah or (more depressingly) where New Yorkers take their kids for flute lessons. I’m simply protesting the way he’s chosen to arouse reader interest by appealing to human vanity by making a story about inter-species relationships into a story that’s all about humans.
I contrast Wade’s article with another animal-research tale where humans actually are relevant. Writing in New Scientist, Alison Motluk describes how several research teams discovered that the gene for kicking off puberty in mice are the same in humans (article is behind a subscription wall — sorry!). That means our puberty genes are mighty old. They’ve been preserved since before the time when human and mouse ancestors separated on the evolutionary tree. Of course this isn’t exclusively a story about humans either, but it isn’t a stretch for Motluk to bring homo sapiens into the mix.
The point is: not every science story has to be about human beings in order to spark human interest. Sometimes humans are organic to the story, and sometimes they aren’t. A good science journalist should know the difference. This is advice I try to follow too.
