Tweet

John Hawks

23 Jun, 8 tweets, 4 min read

@nytimes

Today, I'm reflecting on how this reporter was betrayed by her @nytimes editors. The reporting turned up so many newsworthy ledes, and instead they let it tailspin into a tuna Zoomer fluff story that spreads basic science misinformation. nytimes.com/2021/06/19/sty…

@nytimes

@nytimes For instance, "a handful" of commercial food testing labs refused to take the @nytimes samples. They all said (accurately!!) that the technology wouldn't give an answer. Why is this not the lede in a story that is really about the challenges in sourcing food ingredients?

@nytimes

@nytimes We have just gone through a year in which PCR testing has been a major news story. Understanding what it is, its strengths and limits, why it was so hard to get right, is pretty important. COVID testing brought down a President. So why does this story fumble PCR so badly?

@nytimes

@nytimes DNA testing is not the solution to every problem, and the reporter's experience pretty well shows that. So why is there no shoe-leather reporting here about how the tuna actually gets into the pouches? It's reporting 101 that if the tuna really is tuna, the tuna is not the lede!

@nytimes

@nytimes Packaging and sending frozen samples to a lab is not exotic color. People in this country do it every day. Many folks get frozen food shipped to their homes; entire companies are built on this. The @nytimes loses frozen tuna in the mail. Where did it go? Why is this not a story?

@nytimes

@nytimes The reporter gets some great info from her sources who man the counters at Subway, but there is absolutely no followup. How about the 72-hour rule? That's news! Is this unusual, or is it industry standard? Where does it fit in food safety guidelines? Does it vary state-to-state?

@nytimes

@nytimes Maybe most important, the one nugget of tuna news: The fish comes to each franchise in aluminum pouches *like the ones any of us can buy at the grocery store*. What about OTHER RESTAURANT CHAINS? Is this unusual or standard? How long has it been this way?

@nytimes

@nytimes What I see in this story is a newsroom where the different sections never talk to each other. Where a story that obviously touches on politics, business, law, and science never gets read by anyone who knows anything about those areas. That's an editing catastrophe.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @johnhawks

John Hawks

@johnhawks

24 Jun

The new report of fossil material from Nesher Ramla, Israel, claims a "previously unknown archaic Homo population" some 140,000 years ago. It's a big claim in an area where most scientists have thought that early modern humans and Neandertals interacted. science.sciencemag.org/content/372/65…

Looking at the morphology of the mandible NR-2, it falls within the variation of fossils attributed to Neandertals, and is similar to Krapina, which is around the same age, and Sima, which are early Neandertals. This seems like a basic early Neandertal jaw.

The other fossil NR-1 is a complete right parietal bone and fragments of the left parietal. The analysis of shape places is near late Neandertals and early Neandertals, but a bit less "barrel-shaped", thereby similar to generalized H. erectus and African Middle Pleistocene Homo.

Read 11 tweets

John Hawks

@johnhawks

19 May

Classic paper: "Biology and Body Size in Human Evolution: Statistical Inference Misapplied" Richard Smith (1996, Current Anthropology) works through examples to show how mistaken ideas about extinct species can arise through estimation of body mass. doi.org/10.1086/204505

"[A]s of today, many inferences about fossil hominids are being made on the basis of body mass alone, and the range of uncertainty is being mostly ignored." This problem remains 25 years later.

"Finally it must be reemphasized that all of this discussion does not apply only to body mass. With the growing interest in life-history, the potential misuse of traits such as molar eruption age, sex dimorphism, and cranial capacity is clearly on the horizon."

Read 4 tweets

John Hawks

@johnhawks

19 May

"A new dating program using the isochron method for burial dating has established an absolute age of 2.22 ± 0.09 Ma for a large portion of the Lower Bank, containing the earliest Oldowan stone tools and fossils of Paranthropus robustus in South Africa." doi.org/10.1016/j.jhev…

If this date is accurate, it places a good Oldowan assemblage into a temporal context where it's not clear Homo was present at all. These are Paranthropus or Australopithecus tools.

Only 2 fossils from Swartkrans Lower Bank can be excluded from Paranthropus: an isolated molar fragment and a juvenile mandible fragment, SKX 21204. The unerupted premolars of this otherwise super fragmented specimen are interesting.

Read 9 tweets

John Hawks

@johnhawks

7 May

Anthropologists of the 1990s often did pygmy marmoset-to-gorilla regressions across primates to "predict" all kinds of things about extinct hominins. We don't teach this anymore, but the resulting myths are tenacious. One of those is "Dunbar's number". royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…

The idea was that brain size limits the number of social relationships you can have. Dunbar took a cross-primate regression of group size and brain size, and plotted humans. He surmised that the human brain should max out at around 150 social relationships. This isn't right.

Psychologists ran with this idea, trying to find all kinds of ways that 150 might make sense. But people are pretty variable in how they apportion their social lives. That didn't stop Silicon Valley types from encoding "Dunbar's number" into their social media worldview.

Read 6 tweets

John Hawks

@johnhawks

6 May

I'm concerned about the narrative I've been seeing about burial. All current and recent cultures have had some form of mortuary practice. To dig a hole, place a single intact body, and cover it up is only one pathway among a wide spectrum.

There is nothing about this burial pathway that is more "human", or more demonstrative of "symbolic culture", or "higher" than others. Communal burials, catacombs, creches, skull curation, sky burial, ritual cannibalism, and mummification are all human.

Single body burial is presently widespread around the world, and this owes much to traditions rooted in Islamic, Christian, and Jewish heritage, coupled with colonial and industrial economies. Burial marks status even in geographic regions where it was not historically practiced.

Read 7 tweets

John Hawks

@johnhawks

9 Apr

A hint of the social behavior of early Homo erectus comes from the earliest known #hominin to survive with near total loss of teeth, 1.8 million years ago. Some wild primates also survive years with little functional dentition. #paleoanthropology #FossilFriday

For years, anthropologists have looked at the survival of older people with tooth loss as a possible indication of social caring, empathy, and value of tradition and knowledge to social groups—once with Neandertals, more recently with H. erectus. #paleoanthropology

@goCMNH

Some have criticized inferences about social care in these human relatives, by pointing out other primates that sometimes survive. This wild chimpanzee skull in the collection of the @goCMNH is a great example, with loss of all but one molar and premolars.