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But, Rachael, that's exactly how my blond hair evolved! OK, I was 37 at the time, but still ... Given the appalling lack of basic scientific knowledge in this country, I guess it's hardly surprising to see even science writers and researchers wandering off into the woods in search of ovulating lap dancers and speculation about whether the guys in the Geico commercials would prefer Marilyn Monroe to Jane Russell. Only 14 percent of Americans even believe the theory of evolution is "definitely true''—which could easily explain some pretty desperate adaptive measures to sex up the science, literally. I doubt if these stories are the hoped-for antidote to Mike Huckabee's apparently widely shared feeling that one can either believe in evolution or God; on the contrary, they could well have just the opposite effect, and make scientific inquiry in general seem frivolous, over-packaged and completely expendable.
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Our evolutionary psychology discussion has had me on the lookout for stories that seem particularly ridiculous. And on Fox News today, the morning hosts mentioned a study that purports to show that gentlemen preferred blondes as far back as the Ice Age. I started Googling, and the stories I found demonstrate a huge problem for this particular field of research: The media does a poor job reporting on the science.
For example, the Times of London writes that "north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males." One thing I've learned from my casual reading on evolution is that adaptation doesn't work this way. Yes, if a trait is evolutionarily beneficial, it will get passed on and become more prevalent, while traits that are harmful or undesirable will be lost because the people who carry them don't breed successfully. But a brunette woman is not going to give birth to flaxen-haired tots just because her genes looked around, noticed how all the men were going for the blond hotties, and decided to mutate. (This piece from the Toronto Star explains it better.) Yet so many of the stories I see use this cause-and-effect structure to explain findings on evolution, and the ignorance is incredibly frustrating.
Some of the claims of evolutionary psychologists are shaky enough without such bad reporting, which leaves me with a lot of questions. Do evolutionary psychologists even care that the reporting is bad, or do they enjoy the attention that misleading stories bring to them? And is too much to expect journalists to have a little bit of knowledge about the subjects they cover?
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