What a week! We hadn't expected for the publicity on our paper in Biology Letters to be quite so extensive and controversial. And we certainly hadn't intended to be cast opposite to Darwin.On the one hand we have had some unfortunate exaggerations, most notably the Huffington Post which writes Darwin May Have Been WRONG (Seriously does the editor think putting it in all caps makes it true?)
But on the positive end we have had some more fair minded reporting of the research, a few examples:
By the way, if you are interested in reading the paper for yourself it is available to download at my academia.edu page.
Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback and some critical thinking towards the research.
Sahney, S., Benton, M.J. and Paul Ferry 2010. Links between global taxonomic diversity, ecological diversity and the expansion of vertebrates on land. Biology Letters 6:544-547.
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4 comments:
Thank you! The sensationalist reporting was getting to be quite annoying. On the plus side, it made me aware of your research and I had great pleasure reading the paper in question...
At least there's been a reasonable treatment about it recently on HuffPo ("Darwin was NOT wrong -- New Study Being Distorted").
I love that you linked to PZ Myers's post titled "Curl up and die already, HuffPo". Thanks for these clarifications.
What's mildly odd is that the BBC article is written by a very fine palaeontologist, Howard Falcon-Lang. He's done a lot of excellent work on the Carboniferous, at places like Joggins. And has had news stories about his own work. A recentish example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7047065.stm
So, you'd think he'd know better really. Oh well. Apparently he's on some sort of media placement, so I guess it takes time to learn the ropes (though still no excuse for Darwin related sensationalism).
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