Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Taking wagers

Evolution News & Views; these are the folks who say of their own blog:

The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site.
They do that job admirably, misreporting evolution in every post.

I'm taking bets, here. How long will it take them to misrepresent this fascinating story from the Los Angeles Times:
Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution with its knuckle-dragging ape and briefcase-carrying man.

The new research by famed paleontologist Meave Leakey in Kenya shows our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, calling into question the evolution of our ancestors.

The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens. But those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.
The original Nature paper is here (subscription required).

My bet is it will take Evolution News & Views fully 18 hours from when this blog post is up to misrepresent this story. Anyone?

EDIT: Not sure what time zone his post is in, but if it's in the same time zone as my server (which I think it is) it was almost 24 hours. Blech.

Digg!

4 comments:

ERV said...

You know what pisses me off about EN&V?

Google has them AND Uncommon Descent as a 'news' source, but dropped ScienceBlogs.

Boo.

The Factician said...

Yep, they have a better PR department, apparently (and nicer fonts).

No bet?

ERV said...

I dont think they made it 18 hours...

Forrest Proper said...

I saw two newspaper headlines about this yesterday morning, both in middle-of-the-road, non-nutsoid newspapers-

"Evolutionary Theory Called into Question by New Discoveries"

and

"New Discovery Challenges Evolution Myth"

I may have alarmed my wife when I began spluttering coffee and screaming obscenities at the table...