“Unchanging bacteria” revisited: dreadful science reporting in The Washington Post

It’s a sad situation that the only newspaper in the U.S. that still has a full science section is the New York Times (it’s on Tuesday), and even much of that is devoted to “health”.  Other papers seem to act as “article aggregators,” with poorly-trained science journalists simply accepting a new finding at face value based on the authors’ claims or on what the authors’ universities put out in their press release (Science Daily is notorious for uncritically regurgitating such claims.)

But, as always with striking new results, it’s caveat emptor. Remember how the papers jumped all over the findings of arsenic bacteria (i.e., bacteria using arsenic in their DNA), a finding that was later refuted? Most of the papers that heralded this bacterium as a “new form of life” didn’t devote much (or any) space to the refutation. For showing that a fancy new result is actually a flash in the pan is merely “dog bites man” stuff.

A good example of uncritical reporting is a piece by Sarah Kaplan in Wednesday’s Washington Post: “The mysterious 2-billion-year-old creature that would make Darwin smile.” It is, of course the bacterium that I wrote about the same day: a sulfur-metabolizing microbe whose morphology (and metabolic sulfur products) seem to have been unchanged for over two billion years. Kaplan’s reference to “Darwin’s smile” refers to the authors’ claim that their results supports Darwinism’s “null hypothesis”: we don’t expect evolution in an unchanging environment.

There are two problems with both the original paper by J. W. Schopf et al. and Kaplan’s summary of it. See my critique for much more information:

1. “Darwin’s null hypothesis,” as the authors and Kaplan present it, is flatly wrong: we sometimes do expect evolution in an unchanging environment; and if we found it, it certainly wouldn’t be a severe problem for evolutionary theory (see below).

2. The authors show only relative stasis (lack of change) in the appearance of the sea-floor bacteria and in the compounds they excrete. They have no way of showing whether other traits or genes have remained static over two billion years. For example, any genes affecting the efficiency of sulfur uptake, or of the rate of reproduction of the bacteria, might have changed but simply couldn’t be detected in the material examined.

But Kaplan couldn’t be bothered to dig beneath the surface of the authors’ claims; in fact, the two people she quotes about the paper were both authors of it! Here’s part of her report:

“The microbes we see in the fossils are almost identical to what we see in the ocean now,” study co-author Malcolm Walter, a professor of astrobiology at the University of New South Wales, told The Washington Post in a telephone interview. “They have similar shapes and are doing similar chemistry.”

But the fact these particular organisms successfully avoided evolving for billions of years doesn’t disprove the theory of evolution — quite the opposite.

Darwin’s theory states that species evolve through natural selection in response to environmental changes — increased threats from predators, new competition from other animals, changes in access to water or air. But the inverse is also true: If there is no change in the environment of a balanced ecosystem, the organisms that constitute it should remain similarly unchanged — a principle dubbed evolution’s “null hypothesis.”

“These microorganisms are well-adapted to their simple, very stable physical and biological environment,” the study’s lead author, University of California at Los Angeles professor William Schopf, said in a university press release. “If they were in an environment that did not change but they nevertheless evolved, that would have shown that our understanding of Darwinian evolution was seriously flawed.”

(Note the reliance on the “university press release,” an organ dedicated to puffing up the results of university scientists.)

Schopf, otherwise a very good paleobiologist, is simply wrong here. I bet if you examined the genomes of the 2-billion-year-old bacterium and its modern descendants (if they are descendants), you’ve find ample genetic change, not just in “neutral” sites, but in genes that actually do something. Of course we can’t study that, for we can’t sequence the genome of an ancient bacterium; but even if we found such change, it wouldn’t violate evolutionary theory in the slightest.

It’s time for reputable newspapers to hire science reporters that do more than simply recycle press releases and do perfunctory puff-pieces based on superficial investigation. There are still some science writers who dig into papers, interviewing a variety of scientists—and not just authors of the paper at issue—who can shed light on new discoveries. These including Faye Flam, Carl Zimmer (who, along with several bloggers, called out the so-called missing link Darwinius), and Natalie Angier. Angier works for the paper, Zimmer publishes there often, and Flam has recently had a piece there. Where are the other papers?

In a world in which science is becoming ever more important, and in which vital political decisions demand scientific literacy (e.g., vaccinations, global warming, and so on), it’s shameful that newspapers are simply pruning the science out of their columns. Or, in the case of the Post, publishing fluff that will produce a serious misunderstanding of what evolutionary theory says.

Naturally the petulant Professor Ceiling Cat has left a comment on the Post site. I hope it stays up.