Mick Hartley

The saga of Darwinius masillae, the 47-million-year-old fossil recently unveiled with much fanfare, is raising more than the creationists' eyebrows. Here's a fairly typical press account from last week:

Feast your eyes on what a group of scientists call the Holy Grail of human evolution.

A team of researchers Tuesday unveiled an almost perfectly intact fossil of a 47 million-year-old primate they say represents the long-sought missing link between humans and apes.

Officially known as Darwinius masillae, the fossil of the lemur-like creature dubbed Ida shows it had opposable thumbs like humans and fingernails instead of claws.

Scientists say the cat-sized animal's hind legs offer evidence of evolutionary changes that led to primates standing upright – a breakthrough that could finally confirm Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

"This specimen is like finding the Lost Ark for archeologists," lead scientist Jorn Hurum said at a ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History.

"It is the scientific equivalent of the Holy Grail. This fossil will probably be the one that will be pictured in all textbooks for the next 100 years."

Hmm. The long-sought missing link between humans and apes…a breakthrough that could finally confirm Charles Darwin's theory of evolution…like finding the Lost Ark…the scientific equivalent of the Holy Grail. Just a teeny bit overstated perhaps?

Scientists like PZ Myers at Pharyngula were, at first, welcoming; though not particularly happy with the hype:

She's beautiful and interesting and important, but I do have to take exception to the surprisingly frantic news coverage I'm seeing. She's being called the "missing link in human evolution", which is annoying. The whole "missing link" category is a bit of journalistic trumpery: almost every fossil could be called a link, and it feeds the simplistic notion that there could be a single definitive bridge between ancient and modern species. There isn't: there is the slow shift of whole populations which can branch and diverge. It's also inappropriate to tag this discovery to human evolution. She's 47 million years old; she's also a missing link in chimp evolution, or rhesus monkey evolution. She's got wider significance than just her relationship to our narrow line.

People have been using remarkable hyperbole when discussing Darwinius. She's going to affect paleontology "like an asteroid falling down to earth"; she's the "Mona Lisa" of fossils; she answers all of Darwin's questions about transitional fossils; she's "something that the world has never seen before"; "a revolutionary scientific find that will change everything". Well, OK. I was impressed enough that I immediately made Ida my desktop wallpaper, so I'm not trying to diminish the importance of the find. But let's not forget that there are lots of transitional forms found all the time. She's unique as a representative of a new species, but she isn't at all unique as a representative of the complex history of life on earth.

But it gets worse. Carl Zimmer links to the advert for the History Channel programme about Darwinius to be shown this coming Monday:

 

Yep. That’s right. May 25 will be more important than 9/11. Than Pearl Harbor. Than every date in human history. Pre-human, too.

Let this be the starting point from now on for all discussions of science hype.

Oh. My. Dog. "The most important find in 47 million years"? "A global event: this changes everything"? This is not helping. It is inflating a good discovery beyond all reason, and when the public hears the creationists declare that it's one fossil of a monkey-like creature, and they're right, it's going to damage the credibility of science.

Scientists are hunkering down for what could be years of debate around “Ida’s” place in the evolutionary tree of life. But their verdict won’t alter the fact that the instantaneous fame of this fossil, as well as the secrecy and spin used to create it has indeed “changed everything”—about the relationship between scientific research, media, and popular culture. At the center of this shift is Jørn Hurum, the Norwegian paleontologist who revealed Ida to the world; a modern-era, media-savvy scientist with the right amounts of showmanship, populist sensibility, and disregard for the normal avenues of scientific prestige required to pull this off. As Hurum, a PLoS ONE editor, and a History Channel executive explained to SEEDMAGAZINE.COM this week, it took a breathtaking amount of coordination between networks, museums, producers, scientists, and most impressively, a level of secrecy impossible to come by in the internet age.

Ida’s debut to the world was comprised of an astonishingly slick, multi-component media package—certainly the first of its kind. In addition to the press conference itself, Little, Brown, and Company released The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor, by Colin Tudge on Tuesday; a multimedia-rich website, RevealingTheLink.com, was launched; and a two-hour documentary will air on the History Channel, the BBC, and various stations in Germany and Norway next week. And for the first time in the History Channel’s history, their television programming is timed with the release of a scientific paper: The paper published on Monday by Hurum’s team in the open-source journal, PLoS ONE. While the scientific community is just beginning to determine Ida’s significance on the evolutionary spectrum, her place in the zeitgeist is secured.

“It’s an incredible coup from the business side of things,” says Ronnie Krensel of Camouflage TV, a production company whose clients include the Discovery Channel, A&E, and TLC. “The way these things used to work is that a finding was released in the scientific journals and then it finds its way into the more popular media, and then production companies find out about it and do a TV show.” In the case of Ida, a production company got in on the ground floor, filming the entire research process as it happened….

Negotiations begun with the History Channel, who the New York Times reported paid more for The Link than they have for any other single documentary, along with the BBC, the German broadcaster ZDF, and the Norwegian station NRK.