Showing posts with label Elaine Morgan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elaine Morgan. Show all posts

Thursday 27 October 2016

Murky waters: why is the aquatic ape hypothesis so popular?


Whilst not in the same class as the laughably abysmal Discovery Channel mockumentaries on the likes of mermaids and extant (rather than extinct) megalodon, the recent two-part David Attenborough BBC Radio 4 documentary The Waterside Ape has left me gritting my teeth...grrr.

The programme has confirmed something I suspected from his 2010 BBC television series and associated book, First Life: namely, that the style of his exposition takes priority over the substance of his material. I'll quickly recap on the howler he made in an episode of First Life, ironically one that featured renowned trilobite expert Richard Fortey, albeit in a different sequence. When discussing trilobites, Sir David briefly mentions that they get their name from having three segments from front to rear: head, body and pygidium (tail) - which is totally wrong!

The name is the give-away. Tri-lobe refers to the three segments across the width of the body: a central lobe and two lateral lobes. Many creatures have the head, body and tail segmentation, so it would be far from unique in trilobites. I find this example of incorrect information rather discomforting, especially from someone like Sir David who has been a fan of trilobites since childhood. You have to wonder why experts aren't invited to give BBC science and nature documentaries the once-over before broadcast, just in case any gaffes have got through to the final cut?

The issue then, is that if we non-professionals believe the content espoused by such senior figures in the field of science communication - and if such material goes without basic error-checking from professionals - how is the public to receive a half-decent science education? Of course science isn't a body of knowledge but a toolkit of investigation techniques, but few of the general public have the ability to test hypotheses themselves or access the jargon-filled original scientific papers. So relying on books and media from distinguished communicators is the primary way of increasing our STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) knowledge.

Back to The Waterside Ape. The hypothesis is an old one, dating back to marine biologist - and let's face it, oddball theorist - Sir Alister Hardy's first, unpublished speculations in 1930. However, the idea didn't achieve widespread dissemination until Elaine Morgan began to publicise it in the early 1970's. Otherwise known as a fiction writer, Morgan's output on the aquatic ape hypothesis was originally considered to be a feminist critique rather than particularly serious science, bearing in mind that the author lacks professional training or experience in the field of evolutionary biology.

Whether it is thanks to dissemination via the World Wide Web, her pro-aquatic ape books have become ever more popular over the past twenty years. This is in spite of the ever-increasing number of hominin fossils and sophisticated analytical techniques that have shown little support for the idea. I'm not going to examine the evidence for and against the hypothesis, since that has been done by many others and I'm marginally less qualified to assess it than Elaine Morgan. Instead, I'm more interested in how and why the idea has maintained popular appeal when the general consensus among the specialists is that it is profoundly incorrect.

Could it be that the engaging quality of Morgan's writing obscures a lack of dry (geddit?) analysis upon a subject that could at best be deemed as controversial - and thus fool the general readership as to its validity? Or is there more to it than that? The BBC seem to have maintained an on-going interest in supporting her work over the past two decades.

Indeed, The Waterside Ape is not David Attenborough's first foray into the idea. He made another two-part BBC Radio 4 series called Scars of Evolution back in 2005, which included some of the same interviews as the recent programmes. The BBC and Discovery Channel also collaborated in 1998 on a television documentary favouring the hypothesis called surprisingly enough The Aquatic Ape, albeit without Attenborough's involvement.

A key argument that I'm sure gets public support is that the of a radical - and female - outsider being shunned by the conservative, male-dominated establishment, with Elaine Morgan pitted against the reactionary old guard of palaeontologists, biologists, etc. Her plight has been described in the same vein as meteorologist Alfred Wegener's battle with orthodox geology between the world wars, but in Wegener's case his hypothesis of continental drift lacked a mechanism until plate tectonics was formulated several decades later. As for the aquatic ape, there seems to be a suite of models describing a gamut of ideas, from the uncontroversial speculation of hominins wading for iodine- and Omega-3-rich foodstuffs (promoting brain growth) to human ancestors being Olympic-class ocean swimmers who would feel at home in a Discovery Channel mermaid mockumentary.

We shouldn't ignore the emotive aspects of the hypothesis, which the various programmes have described as a "fascinating idea" that would be "lovely to confirm". Since most people still think of dolphins as innocent, life-saving and cute (when in fact they play brutal cat-and-mouse games with live porpoises) could this be a psychological attempt to salvage something of our own rapacious species?

Elaine Morgan admitted that her first book was a response to her annoyance with the 'killer ape' theories of the 1960's, as espoused in Robert Ardrey's seminal 1961 volume African Genesis. In these post-modern, politically-correct times of gatherers first and hunters second, Raymond Dart and Robert Ardrey's once-influential machismo ape-man has fallen from favour. Unfortunately, the famous Ardrey-influenced Dawn of Man sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey promotes just such a viewpoint, so perhaps it isn't any wonder that supporting a more tranquil aquatic ancestry might appear to be an easy way to bring 21st century sensitivities to a world reeling from constant violence.

Another possible reason for the hypothesis' widespread support is that it relies on what appears to be an impressive accumulation of facts in the Darwinian mould, without recourse to difficult mathematics or sophisticated technical jargon. For those unable to get a clear understanding of major contemporary science (Higgs boson, anyone?) the idea of aquatic ape ancestors is both romantic and easy to digest, if the supporting evidence is taken en masse and the individual alternatives for each biological feature ignored or undeclared.

Clearly, whoever thinks that science is detached from emotion should think again when considering the aquatic/waterside/paddle-boarding ape. Although on the surface a seductive idea, the collection of proofs are selective, inadequate and in some cases just plain wrong. It might be good enough for the sloppy pseudo-scientific archaeology of Graham Hancock and Erich von Daniken, but good science needs rather more to go on. Yes, there are some intriguing nuggets, but as Dr Alice Roberts said in her critique of the recent Attenborough radio series, science is about evidence, not wishful thinking. Unfortunately, the plethora of material contains rather more subtleties than trilobite nomenclature, so I can only sigh again at just how many equally poorly-concocted ideas may be swashing around the world of popular science communication. Come on, Sir David, please read past the romance and dig a bit deeper: the world needs people like you!

Saturday 9 January 2010

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Or who validates popular science books?)

Gandhi once said "learn as if you were to live forever", but for the non-scientist interested in gaining accurate scientific knowledge this can prove rather tricky. Several options are available in the UK, most with drawbacks: there are few 'casual' part-time adult science courses (including the Open University); the World Wide Web is useful but inhibits organised, cohesive learning and there's always the danger of being taken in by some complete twaddle; whilst television documentaries and periodicals rarely delve into enough detail. This only leaves the ever-expanding genre of popular science books, with the best examples often including the false starts and failed hypotheses that make science so interesting.

However, there is a problem: if the book includes mistakes then the general reader is unlikely to know any better. I'm not talking about the usual spelling typos but more serious flaws concerning incorrect facts or worse still, errors of emphasis and misleading information. Admittedly the first category can be quite fun in a 'spot the mistake' sort of way: to have the particle physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw inform you that there were Muslims in the second century AD, as they do in Why does E=mc2? (and why should we care?) helps to make the authors a bit more human. After all, why should a physicist also have good historical knowledge? Then again, this is the sort of fact that is extremely easy to verify, so why wasn't this checked in the editing process? You expect Dan Brown's novels to be riddled with scientific errors, but are popular science book editors blind to non-science topics?

Since the above is an historical error many readers may be aware of the mistake, but the general public will often not be aware of inaccuracies relating to scientific facts and theories. Good examples of the latter can be found in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling popular science book in the UK in 2005. As a non-scientist Bryson admits that it's likely to be full of "inky embarrassments" and he's not wrong. For instance, he makes several references to the DNA base Thymine but at one point calls it Thiamine, which is actually Vitamin B1. However, since Bryson is presenting themed chapters of facts (his vision of science rather than any explanation of methods) these are fairly minor issues and don't markedly detract from the substance of the book.

So far that might seem a bit nitpicky but there are other works containing more fundamental flaws that give a wholly inaccurate description of a scientific technique. My favourite error of this sort can be found in the late Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millennium and is howler that continues to astonish me more than a decade after first reading. Gould correctly states that raw radiocarbon dates are expressed as years BP (Before Present) but then posits that this 'present' relates directly to the year of publication of the work containing that date. In other words, if you read a book published in AD 2010 that refers to the date 1010 BP, the latter year is equivalent to AD 1000; whereas for a book published in AD 2000, 1010 BP would equate to AD 990. It's astounding that Gould, who as a palaeontologist presumably had some understanding of other radiometric dating methods, could believe such a system would be workable. The 'present' in the term BP was fixed at AD 1950 decades before Gould's book was published, so it doubly astonishes that no-one questioned his definition. You have to ask were his editors so in awe that they were afraid to query his text, or did his prominence give him copy-editing control of his own material? A mistake of this sort in a discipline so close to Gould's area of expertise can only engender doubt as to the veracity of his other information.

A more dangerous type of error is when the author misleads his readership through personal bias presented as fact. This is particularly important in books dealing with recent scientific developments as there will be few alternative sources for the public to glean the information from. In turn, this highlights the difference between professionals and their peer-reviewed papers and the popularisations available to the rest of us. There is an ever-increasing library of popular books discussing superstrings and M-theory but most make the same mistake of promoting this highly speculative branch of physics not just as the leading contender in the search for a unified field theory, but as the only option. Of course a hypothesis that cannot be experimentally verified is not exactly following a central tenet of science anyway. There has been discussion in recent years of a string theory Mafia so perhaps this is only a natural extension into print; nonetheless it is worrying to see a largely mathematical framework given so much premature attention. I suppose only time will tell...

It also appears that some publishers will accept material from senior but non-mainstream scientists on the basis of the scientist's stature, even if their hypotheses border on pseudoscience. The late Fred Hoyle was a good example of a prominent scientist with a penchant for quirky (some might say bizarre) ideas such as panspermia, who although unfairly ignored by the Nobel Committee seems to have had few problems getting his theories into print. Another example is Elaine Morgan, who over nearly four decades has written a string of volumes promoting the aquatic ape hypothesis despite lack of evidence in the ever-increasing fossil record.

But whereas Hoyle and Morgan's ideas have long been viewed as off the beaten track, there are more conventional figures whose popular accounts can be extremely misleading, particularly if they promote the writer's pet ideas over the accepted norm. Stephen Jay Gould himself frequently came in for criticism for overemphasising various evolutionary methods at the expense of natural selection, yet his peers' viewpoint is never discussed in his popular writings. Another problem can be seen in Bryan Sykes's The Seven Daughters of Eve, which received enormous publicity on publication as it gratifies our desire to understand human origins. However, the book includes a jumbled combination of extreme speculation and pure fiction, tailored in such a way as to maximise interest at the expense of clarification. Some critics have argued the reason behind Sykes's approach is to promote his laboratory's mitochondrial DNA test, capable of revealing which 'daughter' the customer is descended from. Scientists have to make a living like everyone else, but this commercially-driven example perhaps sums up the old adage that you should never believe everything you read. The Catch-22 of course is that unless you understand enough of the subject beforehand, how will you know if a popular science book contains errors?

A final example does indeed suggest that some science books aimed at a general audience prove to be just too complex for comprehensive editing by anyone other than the author. I am talking about Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. At over one thousand pages this great tome is marketed with the sentence "No particular mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader is assumed", yet I wonder whether the cover blurb writer had their tongue firmly in their cheek? It is supposed to have taken Penrose eight years to write and from my occasional flick-throughs in bookshops I can see it might take me that long to read, never mind understand. I must confess all those equations haven't really tempted me yet, at least not until I have taken a couple of Maths degrees...