It has a nice poetic ring to it, and we can understand why a sci-fi blog would theorize that tinkering with this important gene could turn our fair home into Planet of the Apes. But we have to play the fun police on this one: The headline is just so wrong.

FOXP2 certainly is important. The scientists say in the Nature study that “so far, the transcription factor FOXP2 (forkhead box P2) is the only gene implicated in Mendelian forms of human speech and language dysfunction.” They say that scientists don’t know for sure whether this two-amino-acid change in human FOXP2 occurred around the same time we developed language and is connected us beginning to talk, but their study teases the idea: “These data provide experimental support for the functional relevance of changes in FOXP2 that occur on the human lineage, highlighting specific pathways with direct consequences for human brain development and disease in the central nervous system (CNS).”

But the fact that FOXP2 is connected with human language, and that chimps have a slightly different version of the gene, doesn’t mean chips would start reciting Shakespeare if we swapped our version for theirs. For one thing, there are unavoidable physical differences in the voicebox and the size (and non-speech functions) of the brain. And FOXP2 isn’t “The Speech Gene.” Rather, it exerts some control over a series of other genes that all work in concert—at least 116 of them in humans.

The New York Times reports:

Several of the genes under FOXP2’s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure, meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolved together in making language and speech a human faculty.

So  talking chimps aren’t coming just because of one genetic tweak. But maybe I’ll move Planet of the Apes up to the top of my Netflix queue—original version, of course.

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Image: flickr / King Chimp

From a piece posted earlier this week:

Women: do you have a man? If you do, better beware. Chances are that some lone female has her eye on him.

A new study provides evidence for what many have long suspected: that single women are much keener on pursuing a man who’s already taken than a singleton.

The study of which they speak consisted of a survey of 184 heterosexual university students, both male and female. Half were single, and half in relationships. The entire group was told that a computer program would match them with an ideal partner.

Unbeknownst to the participants (but knownst to us), everyone was offered a “fictitious candidate partner who had been tailored to match their interests exactly.” Every woman was shown the same picture of “Mr Right,” and ditto for the men. Half the participants were told their ideal mate was single, and the other half that he or she was off the market. According to NS,

The most striking result was in the responses of single women. Offered a single man, 59 per cent were interested in pursuing a relationship. But when he was attached, 90 per cent said they were up for the chase.

The article goes on to quote the study authors’ conclusions like:

single women may be more drawn to attached men because they’ve already been “pre-screened” by other women and found to be satisfactory as a mate, whereas single men are more of an unknown quantity.

What the piece neglected to note was the fact that filling out a survey form indicating you might be willing to go after a dude is a far cry from actually going after that dude. So by logic, a small sample size of women reporting more interest in an attached man shouldn’t lead to a screaming rush of hide-your-men-crazy-zombie-mate-poachers-are-on-the-loose.

Plus, there’s also the small matter of what those photos of Mr. Right looked like, as the study authors note:

One limitation of the present study was that it used a single male and female target photo and although our pretest indicated both photos were perceived as moderately attractive, our study showed men’s attractiveness ratings for the female photo were higher than women’s ratings for the male photo.

So maybe the lede should be something more like: “If your man is not super attractive, other women may need him to be pre-screened before they’d think about going after him.”

This post has been appended from its original version.

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Image: iStockphoto

So Wired took it upon itself to compile an entertaining list of the top five worst science cliches—and called DISCOVER out for employing one of the dreaded phrases (along with pretty much every other science publication).

Here’s a few excerpted entries from the list, compiled by Betsy Mason:

1. Holy Grail: To me, this is the mother of all bad science clichés, the worst offender. And I recently learned I have back up on this opinion from the venerable journal Nature which has literally banned scientists from putting holy grails in their papers.

2. Silver Bullet: No more silver bullets, please. Apparently they are really only meant for werewolves, witches and the occasional monster…. Things that are not silver or magic bullets: antioxidants, carbon capture, disk encryption, GM crops, vitamins, and carbon dioxide mosquito traps.

3. Shedding Light: Why must everything always be shedding light on something else? In addition to the light I shed on dark matter in 2006, light has also been shed on virtually everything you can think of… Googling “shed* light” + science OR scientists OR research returns 6.66 million hits.

Thanks, Wired, for shedding some light on the shifting paradigm of science journalism, and filling in that missing link on our never-ending quest for media’s holy grail. Now all our field needs is a silver bullet (or a revenue model that actually works).

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Outgoing women who drink socially and wear skirts, beware: You have predisposed yourself to being raped. At least, that’s what a highly questionable study headed by psychologists at the University of Leicester asserts.

The first problems lie in the study subjects, not to mention the methods: To find out the opinions of the male population (through a survey—never the most reliable of data sets) the researchers recruited 101 men from local and university soccer and rugby teams. It’s safe to say that this is not an accurate sample of a diverse male population.

Next, the researchers surveyed the subjects about “how far” they would go with a woman “before calling it a night.” For a subject as emotionally, sociologically, and politically charged as rape, a subject that has many contributing variables, these questions are somewhat of an oversimplification, not to mention potentially misleading to both respondents and researchers.

So what were the results? Here’s what the Telegraph tells us:

[Researchers] found that the skimpier the dress and the more outgoing the woman, the less likely a man was to take no for an answer… “Men showed a ’surprising’ propensity to coerce women into sex, especially those that were considered promiscuous. The research seems to show that men are not so much charming women into bed as coercing them,” said [lead researcher Sophia Shaw]. “I was quite surprised how far ordinary men were prepared to go”…. Many men admitted they would go to within a point of rape before realising the girl was not interested in sex.

The Guardian compared the Telegraph article against the actual study:

[Shaw] was surprised to have been presented as an expert scientist on the pages of the Daily Telegraph, as she is an MSc student, and this was her dissertation project. Also it was not finished. “My findings are very preliminary,” she said….

Shaw spoke to about 100 men, presenting them with “being with a woman”, and asking them when they would “call it a night”. The idea was to explore men’s attitudes towards coercing women into sex.

“I’m very aware that there are limitations to my study. It’s self-report data about sensitive issues, so that’s got its flaws, and participants were answering when sober, and so on,” she said.

But more than that, she told me, every single one of the first four statements made by the Telegraph was an unambiguous, incorrect, misrepresentation of her findings.

Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped? “This is completely inaccurate,” Shaw said. “We found no difference whatsoever. The alcohol thing is also completely wrong: if anything, we found that men reported they were willing to go further with women who are completely sober.”

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Image: flickr / 416style 

Here’s how it all started: A University of Southern California study, which is slated for publication next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition, has come to the reported conclusion that Twitter can/might/will turn humanity into a teeming mass of barbarians who engage in all matter of mass killings, wanton torturing, rape, and other atrocities. Or something.

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a researcher and co-author on the study, has been quoted far and wide across the Internets with such gems as:

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.”

Possibly—though “fully experiencing emotions” about others’ psychological states is not something that humans were ever particularly good at. Plus “implications for our morality” can be drawn from just about anywhere, on the Internet or no.

Not to mention the small matter, which some reports fail to mention, that the study’s methodology had absolutely nothing to do with Twitter.

Rather, it focused on how volunteers responded to stories meant to stimulate admiration (for a virtue or skill) versus compassion (for physical or social pain). According to brain scans, the subjects responded instantly to people in physical pain, but took 6 to 8 seconds to respond to virtue or social pain.

Somehow, this finding has grave implications for Twitter, since, according to Immordino-Yang:

For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection.

Uhh, seriously? So does that mean pre-Internet humanity, with its countless hours of reflection, was also blessed with impeccable morality?

Of course, there’s also USC sociologist Manuel Castells, who even admitted that “the study raised more concerns over fast-moving TV than the online environment.” So why is Twitter, or the rest of the Internet, even part of this discussion?

The bottom line is that making sweeping generalizations about the moral implications of getting news online is pointless at best, ludicrous at worst. Chances are, if you saw a tweet along the lines of, say, “ENTIRE JAPANESE CITY WIPED OUT BY NUCLEAR EXPLOSION,” you might take more than a moment to think about it. Not to mention the fact that having a means of finding out about human suffering, even if it’s “too quick,” is better than never learning about it at all.

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Image: Courtesy of Twitter.com

Weirder yet, the researchers don’t even sound assertive, as if their hypothesis needs further testing—not drinking sugary beverages, they say, “can reduce” excess calorie consumption. Well, yes, it can—and it does.

But while there’s validity, however obvious, to the Columbia  study, the U.K.’s Bath Spa University has just published its own, er, breed of ludicrous research: a study concluding that pet owners look like their dogs.

Their methodology: asking non-dog-owners to match photos of people with one of three dog breeds. The test subjects were right more than half the time, while statistically speaking, only a third of the answers should have been correct. The researchers therefore concluded that “certain breeds of dogs are associated with particular kinds of people.” The similarities, of course,  are only “skin deep,” since personality traits were not found to match up as well. A groundbreaking study, really.

So what happened to the excitement of a return to real science, now that Bush is out of office? Where have all the good studies gone?

Image: Flickr / Orin Optiglot

With no mention of the growing obesity epidemic worldwide, it does not answer (or ask) the question of whether it’s an overall increase in body weight that’s translating into into the larger busts.

Plus there’s the little matter of cosmetic breast enhancements, which may also be the cause of the increase. Of course, it’s much more fun (and incorrect) to simply imply that every young lass in New Zealand is simply growing bigger knockers these days.

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Image: Flickr / AZAdam

Case in point: “Shopping is ‘throwback to days of cavewomen,’” a piece by Ben Leach at the U.K. Telegraph. It refers to a study (we use the term loosely) led by David Holmes of Manchester Metropolitan University, which “found” that “skills that were learnt as cavemen and women were now being used in shops.” According to Holmes:

Gatherers sifted the useful from things that offered them no sustenance, warmth or comfort with a skill that would eventually lead to comfortable shopping malls and credit cards. In our evolutionary past, we gathered in caves with fires at the entrance. We repeat this in warm shopping centres where we can flit from store to store without braving the icy winds.

The lead of the news article, found directly below a photo of a Nordic beauty staring lustfully into a shop window (since, naturally, when an article like this refers to the “humans” who love shopping what it really means is “women”), reads as follows:

Shoppers are using instincts they learnt from their Neanderthal ancestors, researchers have found.

So let’s review: According to the study, we learned to spend our days in malls maxing out AmEx cards from our ancient Neanderthal precursors. Except for the fact that Neanderthals are not direct ancestors of modern humans, and the two didn’t have any overlap. So just when did these “instinctual gathering” lessons occur? When we were all riding on the backs of Tyrannosaurs spearing woolly mammoths?

Not to mention the glaring definitional problem: If our non-ancestors are indeed responsible for “teaching” us all these spend-happy behaviors, how are they “instincts”?

And to top it all off, you’ll never guess who commissioned the study:

The study was commissioned by Manchester Arndale shopping centre in response to a rise in January visitors, according to the Daily Express.

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When people have less money, they tend to do less of certain things, like buy $3,000 jackets, order the $250 omakase, and pick up diamond-encrusted lingerie for their penthouse-dwelling mistresses. They also don’t typically fork over as much cash for vacations to beaches, islands, and other ocean-bordering locales.

The good news: Since all these recession-battered folks are crouched in their living rooms watching their 401K values plummet on a laptop screen, they aren’t swimming and cavorting in waters that are also frequented by permanent residents, such as sharks. With fewer humans and sharks in physical proximity, we have fewer chances for said sharks to munch on passing surfers and snorklers. Logical? Absolutely.

Of course, all logic can be twisted and mangled with a little help from the English language. Which brings us to the following LiveScience headline: “Economic Recession Means Fewer Shark Attacks.”Ah where shall we begin…

First, there’s the actual numbers: Shark attacks have fallen “from 71 in 2007 to 59 in 2008, the fewest since 2003, when there were 57.” So the grand worldwide decline is all of 12 attacks. In the U.S., the number of shark attacks went from 50 in 2007 to 41 in 2008. As the article (thankfully, eventually) points out:

Shark attacks basically correlate with the number of people in the water. The more people go to the beach, the more they are in the shark’s home, the offshore waters, and the more attacks on humans.

The key point, really, is the egregious use of “means.” In science, where correlation v. causation is a struggle akin to good v. evil, saying that two things occurring in a similar time frame caused each other to happen can lead to all sorts of unnecessary hysterias and harmful behaviors. And, likewise, a few well-placed words can plop causation in the lap of an effect or event that has only the mildest of relationships to its supposed link.

The economic crisis will have ripple effects throughout every facet of society. Yes, it will make people visit beaches less, so they’ll have less opportunity to get chomped by dorsal-finned swimmersby. It’ll also keep people off the road more (layoffs mean less commuting, and less money for gas) so they’ll be less likely to get in accidents. So does that “mean” that we should start running headlines like “The Recession Could Save Your Life”?

Image: Flickr / Daveybot