News sites left and right are picking up a story that “Scientists solved the chicken or egg problem”. Google News aggregated 164 news articles at the time of writing, with more being added every minute. The typical introduction runs like this:
It is the age-old question that has stumped the finest minds for thousands of years. But scientists claim to have finally discovered the answer to the conundrum of what came first – the chicken or the egg?
~Daily Express
Humanity would be in trouble indeed if its ‘finest minds’ are troubled by trivial questions like this! The articles go on to vaguely describe a particular protein that is involved in egg shell formation. While this is certainly interesting, it’s got little to do with chicken evolution or the famous chicken-or-egg ‘problem’. I tracked down the original publication and first online coverage to find out what went wrong here.
The 'who came first' question is trivial at best.
The original paper appeared over a month ago in a chemical journal of the German Chemical Society. It’s a nice study that describes how the carbon carbonate crystals that make up egg shells are formed. The British researched applied molecular modeling to calcium carbonate crystallization in the presence chicken protein ovocleidin-17 (OC-17).
Normally, small amorphous nanoparticles of calcium carbonate molecules don’t crystallize well because the energy barrier for the transition to the more stable crystalline phase is large. However, when OC-17 binds and coordinates the calcium carbonate particles with its arginine residues (described as a ‘clamp’), the energy barrier largely disappears and the calcium carbonate happily crystallizes. When the crystallizing particle starts growing, OC-17 detaches again. The whole mechanism Freeman and colleagues propose really is quite nice.
Ovocleidin-17 coordinates the carbon carbonate particles with its argenine residues, inducing crystallization.
The first online appearance of the story is in this press release of the University of Warwick. I have to admit, the press release really does cover the research pretty well. Of course it ends with some vague promises for crystallization and material science, but otherwise it is a fairly balanced piece. To spice up the article, the press writer decides to include an innocent reference to the famous ‘chicken or egg’ riddle:
The work may also give a partial answer to the age old question “what came first the chicken or the egg?” The answer to the question in this context is “chicken” or – at least a particular chicken protein.
~Warwick University press release
The anonymous writer is careful enough (“partial answer”, “in this context”), but merely being careful is never enough on the internet… The yolk really hits the fan when mainstream news stories pick up on this press release, with metro being one of the main champions of misinterpretation. The following quote from first author Colin Freeman doesn’t help much:
‘It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first,’ said Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University, who worked with counterparts at Warwick University.
~Metro
After the Metro story launched, other mainstream news sites jumped on the bandwagon for a ride. It’s funny and sad to see the whole story turn into a game of Chinese Whispers. ‘Ovocleidin-17′ becomes ‘vocledidin-17′ on Fox News. On various news sites, the study of OC-17 gets reduced to a single sentence. The resulting article doesn’t make sense any more and has become confusing as hell.
Luckily, many readers are smarter than the science ‘journalists’ that have mindlessly copied and pasted this story:
What a silly article. This finding does not “prove” that the chicken came first. After all, if the first chicken did not come from an egg, it was not a chicken. All this really says is that a protein was identified which controls eggshell formation.
… What overblown sensationalist reporting…
~Gabriel on Metro
I didn’t exactly hold mainstream science journalism in high esteem, but I’m amazed that science journalists continue ‘covering’ science stories in this way, even when readers are calling them out. While the trouble may have started with a misleading introduction and a quirky quote, it is the journalist’s responsibility to check facts and put a story into a context. Coverage like this does more harm than good for the public image of science reporting and scientists themselves:
Another brilliant revelation from the British scientific community, but could the tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money that they receive in research grants not be used to discover something of value like the discovery of a new source of cheap, clean energy!
~David, on Metro
Luckily we’ve still got Wikipedia to guide us when we’re misguided and confused:
Wikipedia entry for "Chicken or the Egg"
Oh, wait a minute…
Freeman, C., Harding, J., Quigley, D., & Rodger, P. (2010). Structural Control of Crystal Nuclei by an Eggshell Protein Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 49 (30), 5135-5137 DOI: 10.1002/anie.201000679
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*facepalm*
I’m at loss of things to say…
(and totally agree about the damage done to science PR; the public has no idea what science actually does largely thanks to ‘science’ ‘reporters’…)
Thank you for writing this up… it’s all over the AP. The notoriously awful Philadelphia MetroNews had a story on this today and I almost threw up my lunch.
Why are we [@scientific blogging community] not publicized science journalists? Why do twats write up bull all the time? It kills me…
I don’t think journalists are to blame here: the fault is the moronic joke hook in the Sheffield and Warwick university press releases.
Terrible reporting indeed, but I think you’re perhaps underplaying the responsibility of the scientist behind this. He gets away with a “doesn’t really help matters” while the journalists get a slamming. As John Rennie said on Twitter, “Reporters should know better. But when experts encourage idiocy, they (intentionally?) invite stupid coverage.”
Actually, I’d argue that the problem is deeper than just bad journalism. Science education in this country isn’t great. And maths in particular is viewed with suspicion. scientific method, in terms of how a theory becomes accepted isn’t actually taught until at the very earliest A Level. People just have no idea how and why science works, unless they do it themselves.
Up on CNN :p
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/14/england.chicken.egg.riddle/index.html?hpt=C1&fbid=I0TJaXP24Dk
I had to keep scrolling up to the cartoon after each quote just to giggle rather than facepalm. I swear the people who make up those kind of headlines come from ‘The Sun’ school of journalism; if there’s a pun/not-funny-witticism in the headline then you’re good to go.
Also I saw that “where do our taxes go” coming from the start :p
I actually don’t think the real blame lies on the reporters at all. The main guy himself is clearly to blame: “It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first”. I mean, seriously, even if he said it in jest (which I imagine – the only other explanation is severe stupidity), he should have known better. But then again, he is an engineer (I have no problem propagating the stereotypical image of engineers as mechanics).
It’s the authors’ responsibility to be clear about the limitations and implications of their work, so both they and the reporters share responsibility here. I wonder if sites like CNN might be convinced to add a short correction to the story? Anyone wants to take a stab at it? ;)
Thanks for the comments everybody!
@Hannah I wish I knew.. Do science reporters even see that there is a problem with science journalism?
@Ed I don’t think the authored encouraged the misinterpretation of their research intentionally. On the Daily Mail, the following comment appeared:
I believe the authors honestly didn’t know things would spiral out of control as they did. Not to say that they couldn’t have seen it coming, but on the whole it’s really an unfortunate chain of things gone wrong..
@Josh The effects of this could be twofold: the science journalists don’t have the scientific background to do proper reporting and/or they write these kind of stories because that’s what their public expects. The comments on most news sites give me hope though, many people seem to realize that this has got nothing to do with ‘chicken-or-egg’ problems.
@Lab Rat I guess an average (not science-crazy like us) person hears about science maybe once or twice every couple of weeks. I can sadly understand why somebody would start posing the cliché “Where do our taxes go” question if you run across ‘articles’ like this..
@Bjørn @Paul I don’t think the blame here lies with anybody in particular, the responsibility for a good story clearly is a shared one, as Paul pointed out. The authors also tried to (naively) repair some of the damage (I saw quotes where the same Dr. Freeman was saying it was better to ask the chicken-or-egg question to a biologist or paleaontologist).
I like the idea of convincing the big media that they’ve got it wrong, but I’m afraid it will be a bit like tilting at windmills ;). The virus-like spread of a virus can hardly be contained when it’s out there, and I doubt whether many science editors/journalists would agree with us that they made a mistake.
[...] bleibt dann noch von dieser Sensationsmeldung? Nicht viel, meint auch Lucas Brouwers, der in seinem Blog-Post auf unzureichende Arbeit der Presse [...]
This isn’t as drastic a slight on Science as may first be assumed. It’s a Chicken and an Egg. What came before the Chicken? What came before the egg? There’s a hint of creationism about this and it makes me chuckle – whatever animal the Chicken evolved from in the first place had obviously been laying eggs, this question is like asking, what came first, Hydrogen or Helium…this is simply daft, a way to make thick (sorry) people go ‘Oooh, inter-er-er-esting…duh’…
Come on. We’re a bit above this. The media has never been happy with cold science because the media people generally aren’t scientists (who could explain this ish to a baby), they’re salesmen and women. Keep up the good work guys, push and push and push.
One day those salesmen and women will HAVE to sell science in it’s cold (actual) form. Then we’re in real trouble.
Oh jeez… Ken Ham just picked up the story and ran with it, claiming the study supports a literal interpretation of Genesis…
Sorry to troll here, but come on. 4 point something billion years ago all this stuff around us came into being. After a few more billion years things had settled down a bit and here we have Earth. The earliest lifeforms acted like bacteria – splitting in two, we can see this today in a petri dish. One day the split had a mutation and for some unforknown reason the thing that came off it was younger than the progenator. It grew to become ‘like’ the progenator (no spell check on this site, soz if I’m spelling in error) and split with this new knowledge, that to split with a ‘younger’ version of itself helped procreation. We are talking cosmic slop here, ancient soup, all animals procreate through this ‘egg’ thing. Seeds from a flower. Fish in spawn. Humans and ovaries.
If we are truly concerned about the misrepresentation of science in the popular media, then we’d better do something about it. Mr Goldacre has done a hell of a lot of good with ‘Bad Science’, but what, really, can we do?
Education, from the earliest ages. I used to have to say the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ in school assembly each day. That is now gone. We are making progress.
Will we be having this conversation in 50 years time?
@Moriarty23: What I can do is write a blogpost like this (I’m not alone, luckily). At least some people will read it (this is by far my most popular post ever, traffic-wise!) and they will know the ‘true’ story. By calling science journalists out on their failures, I hope someday change will come to mainstream science journalism as it is performed today.
This might not be the worst misrepresentation of science ever, but it’s a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with science reporting.
I think a much more intriguing take on the research is, “Can newly identified eggshell-making protein be used to combat global warming?”
Maybe I’m missing some key point here, but rapid, low-energy formation of CaCO2 might be one way to sequester the carbon dioxide that is dissolving in (and altering the pH of) our oceans.
Do we know the gene responsible for OC-17? Can multiple copies be put into a limited-life plankton?
Or am I talking “mad scientist” stuff here?
That definitely sounds like a ‘mad scientist’ plan – but that makes me like it even more!
The OC-17 gene is known and sequenced, so no problems there. The viability of plankton overexpressing OC-17 does concern me a bit. Such a genetically engineers plankton would face pretty stiff competition from Cocolithophores and Foraminifera. If the expression of OC-17 does not confer any advantages such a plankton would likely bite the dust.
What might work though is seeding large basins (seas? oceans?) of water with calcium and bacteria-produced OC-17 (like insulin)! It’s definitely an interesting concept.. Dependent on the thermodynamics of the crystallization reaction it could work !
Heh, I know I immediately thought of this comic strip after hearing the story: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
Sums it up nicely…