Now Guys, this is getting ridiculous… ScienceDaily is perhaps the premier online news source for science related content. It is read worldwide by millions of people, and is likely the only exposure most people have to science.
It is for these reasons that I feel it is imperative for them to report on stories accurately. Now I understand that they are selling a product, and feel the need to embellish stories a bit, but what they are doing is over the top.
Read here how they flub the difference between causation and correlation, and here, how they mis represents technical note involving mathematics, and here how they misunderstand relationships between telosets and tetrapods
Today, they report that Humans lived in China 1 million years ago. Ummm, excuse me?? I’m quite sure humans did not appear onto the scene until at least 800k years after that point… Whoops.
I’m sure the paper references Homo erectus, but the term “human” refers to Homo sapiens only.. It is our “common name”
The scary thing is that I read very few of these ScienceDaily stories, and still pick up so many major problems. This leads me to think that there is a really big problem over there… I guess thats what happens when you have a bunch of kids with B.S.’s in Biology writing this stuff…
1 response so far ↓
1 Kevin // Aug 4, 2007 at 9:31 am
The paper’s abstract itself refers to ‘Early Humans.’
Our finding, coupled with previously published magnetochronology, strongly indicates a prominent early human flourishing in the high northern latitudes of East Asia during or just prior to the Mid-Pleistocene climate transition.
It seems less a bone to pick with Science Daily, and a poor choice of words by the authors. Science Daily appears only to be saying what the authors said.
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