Redheads no more…not

August 28th, 2007 RWA Posted in News |

There has been a lot of blogosphere buzz over this piece that originally appeared in the Australian press, about how redheads are supposedly doomed to extinction due to global gene drift. But as the redoutable Razib Khan explains here and here, the “news” is thoroughly fallacious, based on a facile misreading of the Hardy-Weinberg principle that doesn’t take into account the sort of random deviations and violations of expectation which not only disrupt the linear path which the authors have plotted, but render any accurate estimation of the “moment” of extinction implausible.

Although this sort of faddishness and sensationalism is par for the course in mainstream science journalism (heck, in all journalism, period), it’s particularly teeth-grating when they do so in a way which specifically misrepresents evolutionary theory. Firstly, it provides further ammunition for the science-haters who are able to point to the article as another instance of “fraud” that supposedly proves that evolution is wrong and that whatever “theory” they are trying to peddle is just as viable. Second, it provides a false image of how the scientific method works in biology, without providing details about how the conclusion was arrived at. We shouldn’t expect lengthy detours into explanations of allelle frequencies and homozygosity, but when it comes to science journalism, we should all be Missourians, demanding that they show us how it was done. This lack of detail has served to empower creationists, who use arguments from ignorance in their “questioning” of evolutionary science, and others who chose to remain in the dark as well. A more detailed explanation of the Hardy-Weinberg principle would not only have been more useful in the original news article, but in other science reporting as well: the hypothesis serves as one of the bases for determining which species are significantly endangered or threatened enough to merit special levels of government protection. If more people actually understood the science behind the Endangered Species Act instead of reflexively supporting or opposing it on the basis of either economic interests or sentimental value, then we might be able to undertake more constructive discussions of environmental policy.

In the meantime, sorry Cartman, ginger kids will be creeping you out for a long, long time. Fortunately, there is help.