More noise from that perfectly respectable cephalopod RNA editing paper with the bad press release. This time it comes from Quartz.
It turns out these impressive abilities may originate at the molecular level. Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, published a paper on April 6 illustrating that octopuses and their relatives, squid and cuttlefish, can readily change the way they use their DNA. Rather than using their genetic code as a blueprint to build the proteins they need to survive, cephalopods use it more like guidelines.
“This may explain why they’re such good problem solvers,” Clifton Ragsdale, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago unaffiliated with the paper, told Scientific American.
NO IT DOESN’T! If a paper came out that announced that neurons get more of their ATP from glycolysis (which is actually often the case), would you then declare that you’ve figured out how humans got to be so smart? No, you wouldn’t, because the mechanism is so far from the outcome. LeBron James likes Fruity Pebbles, that must be the secret of his basketball skills!
RNA editing is a mechanism that allows the proteins produced by genes (and also, and probably to a greater extent, the non-coding RNAs) to acquire different sequences over time, just like mutations to the nucleotide sequence would. It tells you nothing about the complex sequence of historical events that led to the emergence of greater intelligence.
Also, “Rather than using their genetic code as a blueprint to build the proteins they need to survive, cephalopods use it more like guidelines” is just wrong and implies so much nonsense. Who or what is following these “guidelines”? They make it sound like squid take their genetic output and consciously adjust it to suit some vaguely understood better goal. Post-transcriptional processing is chemistry, too!
I’m also chattering away to a tiny audience over on Mastodon (I’m @pzmyers@octodon.social, if you’re interested), so I figure I’ll also put my comments there over here, so you can argue with me.
It’s annoying because the study doesn’t address the question everyone thinks it does. It’s clear that most people are reading the press release, not the paper, and can’t understand the science behind it.
It’s a bad translation problem.
So now I’m wondering about #scicomm responsibilities. SJ Gould & Dawkins made masterful contributions to the public understanding of science, but they also separated everyone from the source material for their ideas, to the point everyone credits them completely for their evolutionary views.
You have to get down to the root to see the problems. Great communicators seem at their best explaining the twigs and leaves.
Are you denying Alternate Facts? Get with it PZ, it’s the latest thing; and it sells.
SJ Gould & Dawkins made masterful contributions to the public understanding of science, but they also separated everyone from the source material for their ideas, to the point everyone credits them completely for their evolutionary views.
A favourite quote of mine:
One of the things I have learned from reading secondary sources on historical cooking is that you should never trust a secondary source that does not include the primary, since you have no way of knowing what liberties the author may have taken in his “interpretation” of the recipe.
David Friedman http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/To_Milk_an_Almond.pdf
This probably means I’m right not to rely on articles in Quartz and its ilk for science information. As best I can tell, this SciAm article is about the same report. Hopefully they do better, but I’m not equipped to evaluate that.
@3 Robro
My feeling is that one should at least look at the original research.
Often, in my case , I just don’t have the knowledge to read the paper critically but I sometime confirm or doubt what the popular press is saying from reading the Conclusions and Abstract.
If the press release and the Conclusions differ, it is time to be skeptical.
It’s weird how readily people who ought to know better make the preposterous leap:
A. Cephalopods are intelligent. Aren’t they wonderful!
B. Oh, look at that interesting hike in RNA editing!
C. Therefore cephalopods are evidently able to consciously direct the rate and nature of RNA editing which in turn makes them even more intelligent! How they do that is a MYSTERY!!! Gee whiz!!!
It edits the logic right the hell out of me.
There’s an easy explanation for why people don’t read primary literature: they expect it to be inaccessible anyway.
Inaccessible physically, i.e. either hidden deep in university library buildings that only insiders may even enter, or online but behind a paywall.
Also inaccessible metaphorically, in that it’s not written for a general audience, but throws the full brunt of jargon at the hapless reader who ends up understanding nothing anyway.
On the first point, the paper in question is not behind a paywall, but people are so used to paywalls that they tend not to even check… I only did just now and was surprised to find it’s in open access. Press releases should advertise that.
Instead, most science journalism on the Internet doesn’t contain a link to the paper it’s writing about, because science journalists blindly assume that there’s no point: the paper is inaccessible anyway.
Annoying, isn’t it? You get told there’s some strange science described in the popular press, and too often it’s not just that they don’t formally cite the paper, they don’t even tell you what journal it is in, or who the author is.
“It’s annoying because the study doesn’t address the question everyone thinks it does. It’s clear that most people are reading the press release, not the paper, and >can’t understand the science behind it.
It’s a bad translation problem.”
Would you say this is a case of… recoding??