I completely missed the disgraceful hokum the Animal Planet channel aired last week, Mermaids: The Body Found, a completely fictional pseudodocumentary dressed up as reality that claims mermaids exist. You can watch it now, though, until Animal Planet takes it down.
It’s genuinely awful. Total nonsense, gussied up with more nonsense: would you believe it justifies the story with the Aquatic Ape gobbledygook? Brian Switek has torn into it, and of course Deep Sea News is disgusted. How could the channel have so disgraced themselves with such cheap fiction?
Here’s the answer:
ANIMAL PLANET SLAYS WITH BEST-EVER MAY IN NETWORK HISTORY
— Monster Week’s MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND Made Mighty Splash with More Than 3.4 Million Viewers —
(May 30, 2012, Silver Spring, Md.) – Animal Planet devoured the month with its best May ever, earning its strongest performances in both prime and total delivery among all key demos, including prime deliveries of 681K P2+ (+7%), 508K HH (+7%), 330K P25-54 (+21%), 301K P18-49 (+12%) and 193K M25-54 (+30%), and total day deliveries of 456K P2+ (+13%), 355K HH (+10%), 215K P25-54 (+26%), 203K P18-49 (+13%) and 120K M25-54 (+32%).
Animal Planet’s May victory was propelled its first-ever Monster Week (the week of May 21), featuring MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND, which made a huge splash at the “tail” end of the week. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND delivered nearly 2 million viewers (1.96M P2+) for its premiere, making it the most-watched telecast since the Steve Irwin memorial special in September 2006. The two-hour premiere scored a 1.3 HH rating and helped rank Animal Planet #2 in the timeslot, including 960K P25-54 (0.9), 482K M25-54 (1.0) and 477K W25-54 (0.9). The subsequent late-night airing of MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND earned the title of Animal Planet’s most-watched late-night telecast ever, delivering nearly 1.5M viewers (1.46M P2+), bringing the combined viewership to more than 3.4 million viewers. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND encores Thursday, May 31, from 8-10 PM ET/PT.
Brace yourselves. More of this will be coming…unless more of us protest by turning off the Animal Planet channel altogether. They’ve just been rewarded for epic dishonesty with peak traffic; what lesson do you think they’ll learn from this?
Mermaids? Really? *Mermaids* … and no merbarkeepers?
Yeah, something’s fishy here!
What lesson will they learn? Why, how to play the market, of course.
I hate how so many people are sucked in by the dogma that the market comes up with the best outcomes. There are situations where it doesn’t, & this is one of them.
I especially like how the mermaids have human noses, as though they breathe air. VERY realistic CGI.
It’s well known that no one ever went broke playing to the least common denominator. Next: “The Theory of Gravity Debunked – Explaining the “Light In The Loafers” Phenomena”.
I think I’ll stick to the Futurama version of that story, they did it much better and more plausibly – see :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aDK6tOwF68
accompanied by good ole deep southern / sea shanty singing.
Mermaids, really? Seriously? In 2012?
[Shakes head, checks glass, checks story again.]
We need more channels with cheap monster flicks?
Well, with Ancient Aliens playing on the History Channel at this time in my zone, I guess it’s just one more channel trying to fill in for the tremendous loss of Weekly World News.
Ha ha, censorship doesn’t work! Or, more to the point, education doesn’t work for all too many people.
Glen Davidson
As went the Discovery Channel, TLC, History Channel, etc., so goes Animal Planet. These were the channels that were supposedly to make PBS unnecessary?
Dorkheads: The Viewers Found
Do remember that many years ago Animal Planet did a mockumentary about dragons, so there is a precedent for this sort of crud.
And as someone who is a big fan of dragons, and likes at least a little biological plausibility in her fantasy critters…. I was horrified by the way they designed their critters. The ‘scientists’ they used to help design the anatomy should be fired from whatever positions they may hold.
There is not enough space for me to express my overall disgust with this design:
http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/8651/prehistoricdragoncrap1.jpg
These people have clearly never looked at any flying vertebrate in their entire *lives* to think those wings would work! D:
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste or intelligence of the American people. I work with the salt of the Earth, hardworking, midwstern christains, you know, morons. They eat crap like this up, that and creoturd flapdoodle. And Bravo and A&E went the same way, only with infotainment and “Top Model” dreck instead of pseudo-science dreck. Shit, with U-Tube I can pick and choose and search for something interesting/educational. I gave up on TV, broadcast or cable, years ago, the wheat-to-chaff ratio hasn’t been worth the money.
Good to see you finally comment on this, PZ. I was absolutely shocked to hear that this nonsense was aired, but not totally surprised.
I absolutely LOATH animal planet. Instead of interesting and enlightening natural history series, they continually pump out lowest common denominator muck. Shit like Wackiest Animal Videos, Animal Cops and the Pet Psychic. What’s next, “When lions rip off miniskirts”? It seems all the educational channels are anything but in the US. What is PBS like in comparison?
QFT. Over in the UK, the Tories have a fetish for trying to dismantle the BBC. While the BBC has it’s faults, it’s scientific content is leaps and bounds ahead of schlock like Ancient Aliens or this mermaid drivel. We are really damn lucky to have Attenborough.
@osmosis
Their mermaids are hominids who split off from erectus. There’s actually a lot more to the theory than that; it’s a full-blown pseudoscience with lots of focus on minor human features like lack of hair and lots of glossing over of major human features like being bad swimmers.
They had to make the wings look like fantasy depictions of dragons, or else they lose their marketing gimmick.
But frankly, the prehistoric dragon was probably the most biologically plausible of all the dragons depicted in that show. At least it was still a tetrapod! They had all their other dragons somehow manage to evolve a third pair limbs our of their shoulder blades or something.
I’m getting sick of Discovery channel, History channel, nat geo, and now Animal Planet. It’s 90% staged reality shows of people at work, or documentaries that exaggerate the dangers of everything. they are also very fond of using “number of elephants” and “olympic swimming pools” when they describe the size or mass of something. As if that makes any sense to the viewers.
@13, very true. I don’t mind “dragons from another planet with 6-limbed vertebrates being the norm”, but definitely not “dragons are from earth and haves teh 6 legses!”
Feeling disgust over this is sensible. Being surprised over it isn’t. TV is a business, and shareholders want their increase in value. Reality TV and bullshit speculation shows cost relatively little and evidently earn serious coin. Only the naive would not expect to see more of this creep into our content.
Doesn’t make it any less frustrating, though. :(
What’s really sad is some people will believe it.
It looks dumb, but it’s fiction. Animal Planet and the viewers know that it’s fiction. I don’t really see the dishonesty. At worst, it takes an uncritical view of the aquatic ape hypothesis, but even then, I don’t think it’s dishonest to do a documentary based on a what-if scenario (ie. what if AAH is true and an aquatic hominid species split off from our line and continued to exist). It’s basically science fiction in documentary format.
My problem with the show is that I don’t think that I’d be able to sustain my suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy it.
@18….. there were quite a few people who thought the dragon mockumentary was *real*. I’m sure there’s quite a few people who honestly think we’ve found a mermaid.
I must be missing something here, because I don’t understand what’s so horrible about this. Obviously it’s fantasy, but I don’t see what’s so awful about a flight of fancy now and then. It’s the same as the dragon one a few years ago — just silly fun.
If the show’s premise had been a hypothetical look at how a hominid species could have evolved to a totally marine lifestyle and they’d actually consulted with evolutionary biology experts and then listened to those experts, that would have been one thing.
Doing the show in an X-Files style government coverup complete with a Deep Throat whistleblower? Completely stupid.
Also, wasn’t the show on dragons featured on the Sci-Fi channel rather than Animal Planet or Discovery?
Eric O: The trouble is that some percentage of viewers will consider the offered speculation as a valid theory. If the majority of viewers were well trained in critical thinking I wouldn’t be worried, but they’re not, so I am.
I know some otherwise very bright people who believe that aliens created life on Earth. And they point to that ‘Chariots of the Gods’ guy as a credible authority. My head, she asplode.
Well, exactly. There are doubtless people who think “Twilight” is reasonable and real. There are a lot of stupid people out there. But does that really mean that we can’t have fiction in the world in case someone takes it seriously?
Rowant and Silomowbray: I see your point but it’s still hard to find fault with the producers of the documentary. When the Blair Witch Project came out, there were a handful of people who thought it was the real thing. Would you say that the people who made the movie acted unethically by not making it abundantly clear that Blair Witch was fiction?
There was no clear disclaimer on the show…or in promotion. The only one we found was one burried at the bottom of the web page
Looks like the show needs to change its name to Cryptid Planet, given how misleading the current title is.
Will its next episode be on the phoenix? Or maybe they could tell us how they ran across some large, fossilized wing bones that just might belong to a pegasus.
#3 osmosis
The #1 rule of scifi & fantasy is that female monsters/aliens have to be sexy enough to be fuckable.
Male aliens can be as ugly and unhumanly shaped as possible, so men can act out their Rambo fantasy to kill, kill, kill with a clear conscious; and be real heroes for taking out one ugly mf’er.
That is what was so interesting about “Alien”. Both the protagonist and the antagonist were female. I am not sure if it would have worked with its audience as well if the protagonist was male and the antagonist was female.
No. The dragon one was on animal planet.
http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/dragons/
Walking wt dragonns was clearly marketed as speculative…this was marketed as a legit revelation
@Eric O #24- When someone is taking a work of fiction and presenting it in such a way that it appears like they’re trying to say that it’s true, then yes, we can fault them for being unethical in their behavior, just like we can fault companies for selling homeopathic cold and flu remedies that they market in ways that claim their products have an actual effect.
Let’s also not forget Animal Planets Lost Tapes. They’ve established a patern of passing off fiction as truth without even a decent disclaimer. In Search Of was more honest
@rowanvt # 28- My mistake.
No, the rule is that protagonist creatures have to be something we empathize with while antagonist creatures have to be something we regard as being inhuman monsters. Or do you think that most of the audience who went to see Dragonheart wanted to tap that? (Granted, with Sean Connery as the voice there probably were a few people, but I doubt it was the majority.)
The Rambo fantasy/sex fantasy only applies to really badly done works.
Wait, what were we talking about again? Never mind.
Eric O,
It’s not only that they’re not clear on that it’s fiction, it’s also that they’re mixing in the so-called Aquatic Ape theo… erm, hypothesis, which is a pseudoscientific idea in its own right. They’re making it sound like it’s a valid one.
I hate to say it, but my uncle got totally sucked in on this one. He even DVRed it and made me watch with him because he thought I needed to know about this revelation of a massive government coverup. Once I started pointing out the flaws (scientists were played by actors, no record of the scientists on Google, obvious CGI of the big monster reveal, press releases mentioning in the small print that it was fiction), he was somewhat crestfallen.
From the press release at Laelaps:
umm, I’ve heard of those! They’re called fish, aren’t they?
Microraptor: Alright. I can accept that there ought to be a clear disclaimer on mockumentaries and found footage-style movies just like there’s a disclaimer on bubble wrap saying “wrapping this around your head may cause suffocation”. It’s sad that we should need such a thing, but I can understand the necessity.
They’re blue! They’re friends of whales and dolphins! They’re kind of sexy, actually (though evidently nipple-free). And they’re being savagely killed by the US Navy! What’s your problem Myers?
Andyo
As I said, I see the mermaids documentary as science fiction so while I would call it dumb for using a blatantly pseudoscientific theory, I wouldn’t say it’s any more dishonest than movies like Stargate, Prometheus, and Indiana Jones 4, which all use some variation of the ancient astronaut hypothesis. I can’t maintain my suspension of disbelief so it makes these movies very hard for me to enjoy, but I don’t think the people who make these movies are being unethical.
As if “Ancient Aliens” Dinosaurs episode weren’t bad enough.
Addendum to #39
…Except in the sense that Animal Planet is failing to make it clear that the documentary is a work of fiction. I agree that’s a valid criticism.
BOYCOTT is the only action that will get the results commenters here want.
Boycott requires hardship and sacrifice.
And certainly americans are know for sacrifice and hardship–as long as it is someone else that does the sacrificing and endures the hardship. don’t expect too much.
them mermaids have been around a long time!
Atheist, man. You should see the horrible things I say about kittens.
Eric, my point was that it’s not only that it’s based on the Aquatic Ape, but even when they say in the small print that it’s fiction, they’re leading people to believe it’s fiction based on actual science, and that “science” they’re basing it on is actual bullshit (notwithstanding the fact that they’re even misrepresenting the Aquatic Ape hypothesis). Read the Laelaps post, it’s a good one.
Jeebus, have you guys gone to the site?
http://believeinmermaids.com/
Hope the government can sue their asses off.
Plus I love the idea of government covering this up. Why? What do they gain? Its like covering up the existence of gibbons
I saw it first on Discovery Channel in Canada.
Keep in mind that all these channels share and recycle much of their content. Come re-runs next year Discovery and SciFi will doubtless be airing this.
Perhaps coinciding with the theatrical re-release of the redigitized 3D(!) ‘The Little Mermaid’ by Disney.
I had a fifth grade student argue with me about the existence of mermaids during science just last week. I asked him where he got his information from and he said he saw a TV show about it. Now I see where he got it from.
When my now thirteen year old grandson was a pre-schooler, we used to watch Animal Planet together. He learned so much about animals, and developed an interest in becoming an animal conservationist thanks to the excellent programming of the channel at that time. In recent years, he and I have been disappointed in the sensationalized shows and the “reality-type” ones like Animal Cops. It was no longer the educational channel that we loved when he was very little.
My husband and I watched our favorite channel- Sci-Fi – go in the same downward spiral. The new name – Scy-Fy is fitting.
The dumbing down of America has succeeded!
If it were promoted as fiction (outright fiction, too, not just as speculation), it would not be dishonest. Same with Ancient Aliens. Same with religion.
—
…
*raises hand meekly*
Okay, not really the dragon because ow, but that voice.
What your describing IIRC is called network decay or network drift. Its when executives try to take a chanel that caters to a niche and generalize it to attract wide range demographics rather than their target audience. This is obviously stupid as everyone doing it means that all networks are so general as to be interchangeable and thus never attracting a reoccuring veiwership.
…yeah… …those wings would be difficult to fly with.
Also, . What an insult to everyone’s intelligence.
Yes, let the government sue. Active attempts to make voters more stupid should be punishable.
Why is the government covering it up??? Didn’t you watch the show? Covert and illegal testing of a low-frequency supersonar Sound Weapon by the US Navy is strongly implicated in mass killings of not just whales and dolphins but their bffs, our lost sea-brothers! Don’t you see?!
I actually thought it was pretty well done; there was some accurate biology mixed in there.
If the perceived problem is that stupid people might believe it, I don’t really care.
I had no faith in Animal Planet as some sort of Cable Network of Integrity or anything already.
I must point out, of course, that this sort of pseudo-documentary fiction is not a new phenomenon.
Anyone recall H.G.Well’s radio broadcast of ‘The War of the Worlds’?
@Chas
I agree that in a comic setting or steampunk it would be kewl
As a side what bugged me were their eyes…which are big because they live in the ocean thus low light and thus need big eyes….but they have echolocation
Cause dolphins are well know for their huge eyes
Andyo:
I just finished reading Laelaps post as you recommended. I suppose it all comes down to this line:
I don’t really see Animal Planet as a self-styled educational network. I see it as a network featuring a mish-mash of shows, some of which are educational and some of which are meant for pure entertainment. Mermaids falls into the entertainment category.
I do see your point, though. It’s a pseudo-educational program on a semi-educational network, so there’s a risk that viewers might be led to believe that the aquatic ape hypothesis has merit even if they understand that the documentary is a work of fiction.
Eric do you honestly think a movie that shitty would do well without the ontological fruad?
If they had echolocation, wouldn’t they need either big, weirdly shaped ears, or a melon?
They really do. See comments 35 and 48.
Ichthyosaurs, on the other hand, had really huge eyes – and no trace of an adaptation to echolocation. They don’t seem to have been good of hearing at all.
Bingo.
I honestly don’t know. I know that I find the concept too stupid for me to enjoy, but that doesn’t mean that one has to be ignorant to be entertained by it.
One of my archaeology professors liked Indiana Jones 4 despite his utter contempt for Erich von Däniken. I, on the other hand, couldn’t really get past the movie’s stupid premise. It seems to come down to a matter of taste.
The ethical problem (for those that seem to be having trouble seeing it) is that this is not being described by the network as in any way fictional, or even unrealistic. Yet, it is being produced in the same style and with the same production values as the shows that – presumably – the network would like us to accept as fact.
This means that either the network is deliberately trying to blur the line between useful information and bullshit, or that they don’t care that that line is being blurred, or that they’re too stupid to see that that line is being blurred.
(I suppose one could also argue that they never intended their audience to take them seriously from the beginning – but that seems disingenuous in the extreme.)
Unless I am missing another possibility, which of these scenarios is ethical behavior?
I think that you meant Orson Welles.
Who could forget H G Wells as Harry Lime in The Third Man?
I suppose I could have saved myself the trouble by just saying “Welles”. :-)
Sorry, Amphiox, but their last names are spelled differently.
*raspberry*
Oh fuck. The Aquatic ape hypothesis? Actor portrayals of scientists? Crappy VFX?
Quite a nice mess Animal Planet left for others to clean up…
While this sounds awful and all, I will adore Animal Planet as long as they continue to air “Too Cute! Kittens” and “Too Cute! Puppies”.
Remember when it was Fox that showed this kind of schlock?
>Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction.
Erm. Huh.
Does History Channel have a fake pseudo-historical documentary (When Aliens Attacked!) wherein the two names are spelled the same?
No?
Damn….
In the latest season of Ice Road Truckers, there is a running feud between between H G and Orson about the spelling of their last names. Anything for a manufactured conflict.
So they finally hired some executives from The History Channel/Learning Channel/Discovery/Nat. Geo.?
I’m waiting for the Crocoduck episode narrated by a washed up worse than B-grade actor.
The mermaids indeed had a melon in their forehead.
I can’t imagine why they had noses…you’d think those would go
If they wanted to do it right, The mermaid must look like this. That’s right, P T Barnum’s mermaid.
Hmm. Considering all the over-credulous tweets, the personal anecdotes in the comments, and the need for a Snopes article on this, I think I may have grossly overestimated the critical thinking abilities of Animal Planet’s viewership. The reason I wasn’t initially outraged by this was because I had a lot of trouble believing that a significant number of people would take this seriously. Thank you, Animal Planet, for making me just a little more cynical than I used to be.
Earlier, I acknowledged that they ought to have made their disclaimers more obvious for the small handful of people who might think that the whole thing was real, though I really thought they were as necessary as warning labels on bubble wrap. Now I understand just how irresponsible Animal Planet was in their failure to disclaim. I still don’t think they were dishonest – I don’t see any attempt to deceive – but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t acting unethically.
Best FTB login name EVAR.
Also, I like this comment on Switek’s thread:
So, Blondi, what was it like being in the bunker when the Red Army was closing in?
Ruff!
What was it like being owned by Hitler?
Ruff!
The 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast was part of a regular radio drama series but some listeners supposedly missed this. There are apparently questions about how much panic it actually caused.
People can be easily tricked into believing nonsense. A good example would be the 1977 British broadcast Alternative 3. Depiste having credits for the actors involved(including Canadian born character actor Shane Rimmer as Apollo astronaut Bob Grogan), and East Anglia TV telling concerned viewers who called in that it was a fake, many people thought it was real. For example the late American conspiracy theorist Jim Keith claimed elements of the broadcast were true.
Paul Myers (PZ) states:
”
How could the channel have so disgraced themselves with such cheap fiction?
”
Remark: mmmm. Maybe we should ban a lot of other ‘cheap fiction’ documentaries. I am thinking about some shows like ‘Life on Earth’ by Richard Attenborough, and any show that paints the age of the Earth as billions of years old from some sketchy artists impressions and a flawed dating methods based on presuppositions about radioactive isotopes present throughout history, or based on some C14 levels. Or perhaps based on the position of a fossil in rock strata? The lower it gets, the older it’s supposed to be due to the conclusion that it took a while to produce sediment?
Or how about some excited claims about a new Australopithecus found, or even a transitional form of a dinosaur with feathers perhaps showing how birds evolved from dinosaurs?
Media jumps on fictional stories submitted by Scientists or so-called ‘Academics’ all the time. I even remember a religious academic called Barbara Theoring trying to explain how Jesus was tortured, crucified for hours, suffering from dehydration, and finally having a spear spoked into his heart releasing blood and water (showing the heart had stopped pumping blood); and yet this ‘expert’ had the audacity to state on a documentary that Jesus was just unconscious and revived from the cool air in the tomb?
Dr Myers, there is way too much fiction reported on television. It has influenced the whole way Scientists operate. It has lulled a world into believing such far fetched beliefs as an absence of a Creator, and taught science graduates to use a presumption that the world created itself after billions of years, instead of a mere ten thousands of years ….. You win. :)
And antigodless continues to blow his one note butt trumpet.
Fuck but the self blindered one expect others to respect his ignorance.
Show us all the radioactive isotopes with half-lives between 10 and a 100 thousand years, antigodless.
*crickets*
What! The X-files isn’t a documentary!
Next you’ll be telling me the bible is true and antigodless is a saint!
Yeah, right. Radiocarbon dating totally works on things that are billions of years old. And it’s totally used to estimate de age of the Earth. Right. *headdesk*
You’re so ignorant it hurts. Can’t you at least google the things you don’t understand before mentioning them in your stupid comments?
But nightjar, google lies. If you search for “how the universe began”, it does not say “a creator” by default.
If you have any doubts that stuff like this can be harmful, go to – and you’ve all heard this before – the comments page for the YouTube link. Plus some of the comments to the Wired opinion piece. Unbelievable. The problem is though, how fucking easy is it to fool people? How careful do you have to be so that some idiots don’t take your story the wrong way?
Seriously, in 5 years’ time this will be the Mermaid Conspiracy.
Adults are talking
madscientist:
IIRC, History, Discovery, and TLC are all part of the same “brand”. The only outlier is NatGeo.
Fixed it for me. :-/
Reading antigodless always makes me feel like I am reading The Onion.
spideymike
antigodless’s posts always make me feel like I’ve chopped up an onion.
There will be good eats? ;)
You see Weed Monkey, Atheists are like an onion
‘Cos we both have layers!
Agent Silversmith
I almost read your reply as “antigodless’s poes”.
Yes, preceded by intense irritation and trying to remind oneself that rubbing will only make it worse.
Though I must say, no onion ever tried to convince me that the world was only a few millennia old.
We are really damn lucky to have Attenborough.
Sometimes less lucky than other times; April of 2005 was one of those times.
For some reason I could not view the video but I could hear the audio.
The voice over and the absurd music were enough for me.
antigodless,
I make a strong suggestion to you. Before you attempt to sneer at evolution, the age of the Earth, abiogenesis, and other bits of reality, you should learn something about them. The people here know a whole lot more about these and related subjects than you do. So when you say something absurd about Carbon-14, those of use who are familiar with radiometric dating recognize immediately that you’re talking about something you don’t understand. So we know we can dismiss anything you say because we know you’re talking out of your ass.
“Janine: History’s Greatest Monster:
June 10th, 2012 at 6:05 pm
But nightjar, google lies. If you search for “how the universe began”, it does not say “a creator” by default.
”
That’s because Science has been willing to believe a lie to such an extent that the whole faith in Evolution and Old Earth principles are now institutionalised. Science excluded the ‘young Earth’ theory decades ago as too unsophisticated. It then built the ‘billion years’ principles into institutions of higher education and brainwashed the future leaders of 18-24 yrs. It grabbed geologists, paleontologists, biologists, astronomers, zoologists, and mainstream interest in media. The deception was complete. Faith in a billion year old universe that happened by the natural laws of gravity and by giving the universe and ‘mother nature’ a persona equivalent to a Creator, became the dogma of the science establishment. Epic dishonesty wins research grants and the hearts of naive, unthinking university students who become the academics and the scientists of the future, and the lawmakers whom scientists turn to to ban alternative theories taught in schools and universities.
antigodless, minion of satan @77
What and incredibly stupid thing to write. Because for instance a show about Mermaids on Animal Planet has influenced “the whole way scientists operate”. I’m sure PZ is going publish a paper about it (sarcasm).
As for the rest of your Gish-Galloping, red herring spewing post I have just one question. Why do oil companies use “old earth” science to locate oil instead of whatever the fuck delusional shit you posit?
No answer minion of satan?
Trot off to your cut and paste web sites, or perhaps amuse us with your very own personal hypothesis.
*sigh* I suppose it’s too much to ask for a channel that advertises itself as “educational” to broadcast educational content? Oh, right, I forgot – it’s much cheaper to draw up some CGI bullshit than send a camera crew to film real animals. The reality TV phenomenon has a lot to answer for.
Antigodlez:
Please describe TWO alternative theories and explain how they could be falsified.
Put your money where your mouth is minion of satan.
Right. It was those evil, evil, evil television shows that influenced Charles Lyell to conclude that the earth was millions and millions of years old, back in the 1800s.
Television was what convinced Darwin to propose his theory of natural selection.
Television influenced Arthur Holmes when he established radiometric dating techniques (not using C14), back in 1913.
Right.
No, it excluded the ‘young Earth’ theory because IT DIDN’T FIT THE EVIDENCE.
And still does not.
Wow, antigodless, you continued playing of your butt trumpet has me convinced.
Oh noes! It’s the “Evul Conspiriceh” that’s convinced scientists and academics not to believe in a cosmic Geppetto!
Or maybe it’s because the notion that the earth was tinker-tailored into existence a few thousand years back has, y’know … no evidence to support it.
Go find a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian, and it’ll be evidence that evolution is wrong. Any of the luminaries will agree with that – Richard Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, you name it. What’s one finding that you’d accept as evidence that creationism is wrong, antigodless? If you say “there’s nothing”, that exposes your belief as a useless wankfest with no explanatory power.
Ah yes, when you have no evidence to back you up, just rely on the timeless ol’ “IT’S A CONSPIRACEH TO SUPPRESS DA TRUE EVIDENS!1!1!!”. Much easier than spending years doing peer reviewed research and gives you a yummy feeling of self righteousness. Why you just know you are right, everyone else is just brainwashed. And you probably think it is academics that are the arrogant ones.
Why hasn’t anti-intelligence been confined to TZT yet?
It’s the most complete and effective conspiracy ever! Think about it. No other conspiracy in human history has lasted so long, convinced so many, so completely.
Evuh!
There is only ONE logical explanation. The WHOLE THING must have been divine intervention.
Antigutless, this is OBVIOUSLY what you god WANTS. It WANTS the people of this planet to know that the earth is billions of years old, and that life evolved and was not designed.
Why do you insist on REBELLING against the manifest will of your god, heretic?
There’s just no way Antigodless can be that blasted stupid. It’s like watching a car smash into the base of a cliff, back up and repeat the maneuver.
Oddly, I didn’t mind the one about dragons so much, because it was pretty clearly fiction. But I’d agree that such shows belong on the Syfy channel instead of the horribad movies they put on.
As for the other channels : they still sometimes have a good program on, but it’s like mining for gold in a sea of woo.
UFOS, Ghosts, Monsters, Reality TV… The Horror. The Horror
/Col Kurtz.
What pissed me off about the ‘dragons’ documentary was, as mentioned earlier, six-limbed tetrapods.
If you have to have a flying dragon that still has four legs, why not rib-wings like those gliding lizards? I could see those evolving the ability to ‘flap’ if given enough time and genetic variation, and no need to evolve a whole new set of wings.
But no, they gave us six limbed tetrapods and not even an explanation of how it evolved, given that its cretaceous ancestor had wings and no front limbs.
Jeezes Antigodless, even I know carbon 14 has a half life of about 5,000 years and hence is no use in determining the age of fossils. You can only measure up to about 60,00 years; i.e. 54,000 years before your invisible friend made the world.
And THIS is why I no longer subscribe to cable or satellite TV. All the good channels turned to shit.
Citation needed presuppositional fuckwit, from the peer reviewed scientific literature, or you are a proven liar and bullshitter. OOPS, you have already failed all your claims by never showing evidence… You are a proven liar and bullshitter….
I cannot be the only person who thinks they should be more ashamed of the poor punning than the pseudoscience. I’m guilty of frequent punning myself, but this is just insultingly bad, and sandwiched into the middle of the justifiably dry copy that is ratings numbers reeks of some awful person who wants to make their job “fun” and therefore unironically uses comic sans in company emails.
I am judging you, nameless copy writer for animal planet. And you are found wanting.
You have it backwards, antigodless. People used to believe in a young earth until they found evidence that pointed to an old one. Darwin was a christian when he first became a naturalist; it was only after long years of studying nature and making sense of what he’d found that he finally worked out the theory of evolution. Most of the scientists of Darwin’s day were christian, at least culturally, but they couldn’t ignore the evidence that had been found, even if it contradicted what had been taught.
The fact is, there’s plenty of evidence for evolution now. I suggest you read ‘the greatest show on earth’ by Richard Dawkins. He explains about dating methods as well. It’s a very enjoyable book.
This is the only ‘aquatic ape’ for me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgRpwESWPLM
Nope, it excluded it because it didn’t fit the evidence. More lies and bullshit about science without a citation….What a loser, tacitly admitting defeat while pretending to claim victory.
Fixed that for you loser. You have no evidence, as you never cite any, so you have only your delusions. You can only refute science with more science, and you have none. Thanks for admitting it to the lurkers with its absence….
Minion of satan:
Sophistication has nothing to do with it.”Young earth” is not a theory. At best it is a very weak hypothesis. Sophistication has nothing to do with it.
Please describe how the “young earth” hypothesis can be used to find oil deposits.
It would be amusing to see antigutless come into contact with raja the fapwit.
But the concentrated stupidity might collapse into a singularity that swallows the world.
@antigodless
We don’t even need radioactive dating to know that the universe is at least billions of years old. We know the distance of many galaxies using cepheid variables or supernova type Ia. Since the speed of light is finite, it had to have taken time for light to get here, and since we know there are galaxies billions of light years away, we know the universe has to be at least that old. Otherwise, their light would never reach our telescopes.
If it swallows up the SG is Teh Devil/SG is the Martyred Saint thread then it will be a holy accomplishment.
Yay! I actually convinced someone on YouTube that the fake website was actually put up by the Discovery Channel! There is no mermaid government cover up, people!
The question why I bothered is between me and my therapist.
Fixed.
Actually, I’m not even sure it was a hypothesis.
Hypotheses, even wild ones, are supposed to be based on actual evidence, not fairy-tales — even if the fairy-tale is part of the cultural heritage of the scientist making the hypothesis.
At least they admit it’s fiction on their site…
http://press.discovery.com/ekits/monster-week-mermaids/press-release.html
“This two-hour special is science fiction based on some real events and scientific theory.”
…even if the latter portion of that sentence is likely bull.
Admitting it’s fiction is a step. Personally I have a bigger problem with things like Finding Bigfoot, Ghost Hunters, Ancient Aliens, etc. where they give screen time to actual
idiotsfake scientists as if we’re supposed to take them seriously. For those they give them an episode a week – that’s far worse than a fake documentary that only the gullible might accidentally not notice is fiction.As an aside, a rather funny thing is I know someone who has been on Finding Bigfoot – she used to be quite the musician and traveled around making a living playing the fiddle. Our family lost touch with her, and a few years later a family friend informs us she’s on an episode of Finding Bigfoot! Now she’s quite let herself go and is married to some hillbilly living in the woods. She still plays the fiddle damn well, but apparently also thinks bigfoot is throwing rocks at their house at night.
@Ing
I would actually love to see more actual idiots there. That topic is getting tiresome. Otherwise, all I see is rajkumar’s tedious stupidity. More trolls=more variety.
Amphiox #101
Hey, it makes every bit as much sense as the other things they’ve posted.
I mean, zero still equals zero, right?
I watched the whole video in the middle of the night in the hopes that the concentrated dreadfulness – bad premise, bad background ‘science’, bad conspiracy, bad CGI and bad acting* – would defeat the insomnia. It worked, so it isn’t completely useless. =^_^=
As for its predecessor, the dragon mockumentary, I recall at one stage they justified the extra limbs on the grounds that some living animals† can re-generate injured legs and some have been seen with more than the usual compliment of four, so a genetic mutation in an ancestor could have led to an inheritable extra pair. Bit of a stretch; far more so than rib-wings since the dragons appeared not at all amphibian-like. They also posited the creatures generating gas in their innards to help make them light enough to fly.
* I have rarely seen actors so utterly fail to portray their characters in every way. No regular scientist I have ever seen interviewed makes such exaggerated gestures or focusses quite so fixedly on the camera lens. Nor do good actors sound so much like they were only given the script five minutes before the take.
† amphibians only, as far as I can tell from a swift Google Scholar search for ‘limb regeneration’
Tigger: Maybe they were counting tails as a sort of limb?
Ha! Obviously they evolved from winged cats.
Minxy Cottonsocks and the evolution of dropgorgons and other winged cats
Don’t worry about the dumbing-down of America. In the future you can send your kids down to the wharf where they will be able to earn heaps of cash diving for coins thrown off the visiting tourist ships.
You never saw the BBC’s documentary on radar?
It was Orson Welles’ reading/adaptation of H.G. Wells’ story. So you’re both right, sort of.
Speaking of which considering the voice was ORSON WELLES, and given the context of the day one has to boggle at how anyone actually confused it for a real news broadcast. Wouldn’t that be like today someone mistaking Colbert Report for CNN?
Given that people have confused The Onion articles for real news, I can see how it might happen.
For a good chunk of time after The Report started, many conservatives thought Colbert was for real, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some still did. Arguably, if they didn’t outright think Colbert was a conservative, they grossly misunderestimated (yes) his satirical chops when they hired him for the delightfully infamous White House Correspondents’ Dinner Roast.
Now that’s just one more reason to be angry at gullible people. I didn’t get around to watch it yet, but if the movie was good (which, judging from the comments, it wasn’t, I am aware of that) I think I could quite enjoy it. I like fantasy and science fiction. If there weren’t people around who actually believed that nonsense, we wouldn’t have to be that upset, could get the popcorn and enjoy the show.
In my eyes, ‘what-if’ thinking is a fascinating pastime, if only to realize how much of our world would have to be working radically different for even the most trivial and ‘realistic’ fantasy-stories to be true.
Talking of pseudo science
New scientist article on how locking women up is good for men
You would sacrifice the whole world (which you also live in) just to get rid of that particular thread?
I commend you for your dedication….
“Don’t worry about the dumbing-down of America. In the future you can send your kids down to the wharf where they will be able to earn heaps of cash diving for coins thrown off the visiting tourist ships.”
I told my kids something like that to warn them NOT to be snobbish to the staff and crew of the cruise ship we were on, or to the people in the ports.
David, you of all people should know how scientists and polticians outside the US take their marching orders from their US counterparts. We saw it with global warming, and we now see it with mermaids.
LOL!
How about you start here? Radiometric Dating – A Christian Perspective
Don’t forget to read the acknowledgements!
*eyeroll* No. Sediment is deposited – the sed- part means “sit” – by wind or water. Obviously, new stuff is deposited on top of old stuff.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
*eyeroll* What a stupid derail. Do you believe scientists are some kind of monolith who’ll deny each other’s mistakes? Do you believe I care about Theoring’s attempt to explain a story that is probably entirely fictional in the first place?
No. There is no persona. There is no person. The universe is a process, not a person. Nature is a process, not a person, let alone a mother.
You seem to believe science just takes Christianity, takes the words Yahwe and Jesus out of it and replaces them by something else, while leaving all the rest identical. That’s not how it works! The whole enterprise is completely different. To understand it, you need to step out of the mold you’re used to thinking in and understand that science uses a completely different one. Science doesn’t start from Christianity and then adds a few changes, it doesn’t start from religion at all. It starts from, it is, parsimony and falsification by observation of reality.
It shows that you’ve never tried to apply for a grant or to publish a paper in a scientific journal.
To get a grant, you must convince the anonymous reviewers (colleagues whose identity isn’t disclosed) that the research you propose will generate interesting results, exciting ones, groundbreaking ones. If you only propose to confirm what everyone already believes, the reviewers will consider your proposal a waste of time and money!
Almost all journals only accept the most groundbreaking manuscripts they can get. As you can probably guess by now, those aren’t the ones that confirm what everyone already knows. They’re the ones that show that what everyone used to believe is wrong. What do scientists do all day long? They disprove each other’s and their own hypotheses!
Seriously, you can trust me on this. Find my papers in scholar.google.com – every one of them is a long-winded way to say “that’s wrong, and that’s wrong, and that’s wrong, and here’s why”.
You’re stupid to believe that. The combination of stupidity and ignorance that antigodless exhibits is very, very common.
No, PZ always quotes stupid stuff in Comic Sans to give it the ridicule it deserves.
No, Nerd, you didn’t fix it. A few keywords jumped into your eyes, you replaced them, and that’s it – you never read the original or your version for understanding.
Read your version again, and you’ll be quite deeply embarrassed.
No. Amphibians, not lizards.
In answer to PZ’s last question, the lesson learned is that the planet is crawling with idiots – the PLANET, not just Louisiana – (still smarting about last week). Here’s an informal poll – how many of the folks here actually watch “Animal Planet”, anyway? My point is that one won’t take away viewership by venting to this audience, although I suppose that’s a testable hypothesis.
paleotrent says:
I watch “river monsters”.
I will confess to being (sort-of) fooled by this “documentary” last week. My wife saw the promos and DVRed the show. We watched it and I spent the entire show trying to puzzle out if there was any merit to it. As a television show, it was engaging. The actors were good, I thought they were believable. While watching, I never thought for a minute that Animal Planet would air a work of complete fiction which thoroughly mimics a documentary style and in all ways presents itself as a work of fact, with absolutely no disclaimer whatsoever.
Being an engineer by education and a tech guy by career, it wasn’t the phony biology that put me at BS Defcon 4, but the supposedly “real” video a couple of kids took with their camera phone of the creature. The incident was allegedly 10 years or so ago, but the video was filmed using a mechanical zoom lens. At that point I knew there was something amiss. Going online to check on this show, I found a couple of news articles that described it as a fictional show. Mystery solved.
I think this was an object lesson in skepticism. Here I was, not a biology expert in any way, being presented with appears to be a whole slew of “facts” supporting a completely new hypothesis that seemed too fantastical to be true. I allowed myself to believe that Animal Planet was a trustworthy enough source to not dismiss it out of hand. After watching, I had a series of questions, such as “is aquatic ape theory really what was presented?” and “what about that camera phone video?”, and “was this really a documentary?”, “who was ____ (the supposedly real scientist, don’t remember his name now)?” that I was going to try and research to be able to better decide if this had any merit. Pretty quickly it was clear this was all BS.
The end result is that I have removed Animal Planet from the category of “generally trustworthy – assume true”. Now everything that Animal Planet shows will be considered as complete fabrication unless it fact-checks against trustworthy sources. And that’s the result. Animal Planet has destroyed any credibility and I would no more believe what they produce than I would an episode of “Lost”.
Seabisquick
Find and watch “Forgotten Silver” by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes.
Animal Planet has a show about mermaids?
I’d like to say I’m surprised, but I’ve seen Finding Bigfoot and developed a drinking game to go along with it! (Every time someone says, “It’s a Squatch!” and it’s obviously something like an owl or wolf, you take a shot.)
I think reality has long since left the building at Animal Planet.
And at all of it’s Discovery Communications siblings, as well.
Confession: I too watch River Monsters. It’s only slightly less fictional than the Mermaid fiasco.
This show really annoyed me. I like fantasy and I have enjoyed fantasy books like “Flight of the Dragon” and “Gnomes” that deliberately took a scientific approach to gild the Lilly as it were for the fantasy setting they were presenting.
But this is something else. Part of me didn’t even like shows like “Walking with the Dinosaurs” because despite whatever accuracy they had, they were still presenting pet hypotheses and scientific hunches as proven facts. But this ,like the Dragon show before it, feels like they’re deliberately perpetrating a hoax. It’s not even playing with hypotheticals like those assorted alien/future environment programs. It is using Animal Planet’s supposedly nonfiction format to LIE.
I confess to being a relatively easy mark. As I said, I like fantasy and I would very much LIKE for there to be something more out there. Because of this I seriously worry about people who are unable to separate their sense of whimsy from any sense of scientific objectivity.
I swear, it’s bad enough Animal Planet shows that stupid Bigfoot show.
Confession: I sometimes watch Animal Planet for the show Animal Hoarders. I find it psychologically interesting.
Though specific discussions or personal encounters are probably set up specifically for the camera, I doubt very much that they (or any other ‘hoarder’-type show) has to fake or invent people with waaaaay too much damn stuff, animal or otherwise.
I have a hard time watching Animal Planet because those assholes from the “Humane Society of the United States” has the worst fucking commercials ever.
Plus I believe they are a slightly shady organization
Note, they are not the “Humane Society”.
At msn.com today–“Do Humans Have an Aquatic Background?” With videos entitled “Early apes might have ventured into the ocean,” and “Humans might have evolved from water mammals.” The first vid looks like it might be directly lifted from the Animal Planet episode.
Nice to know unscientific idea gets its due share of coverage! Wonder if there is ANY big media coverage of the actual scienctific concensus?
No, real science doesn’t provide good enough ratings.
The Chinese subtitle at the beginning of the video does say that this video is only about a scientific hypothesis, not about real events. But I’m curious why Animal Planet didn’t say that in English either by subtitle or something else. Maybe this video is aired to Chinese speaking communities?
So yes, it IS a fictional video made in the disguise of a documentary.