Very much true. Also some science journals edit headlines to get as many readers to the articles as possible, for example the Nature journal. Sometimes it is positive, as an outsider (editor) may see the general interest of the story better than the authors who focus on a minor detail. Sometimes the editing just severs the link between the headline and the article.
I remember one article (‘letter’) focusing on how the use of antibiotics spreads antibiotic resistance to the surrounding nature, to the bacteria living in the guts of wild animals. We compared gut bacteria obtained from Finland to samples from England - the use of antibiotics is much less and more regulated in Finland compared to England. The manuscript had a title about antibiotic resistance, the topic of the study. When the accepted paper was published, editors had changed the title without asking permission to ‘How wild are wild animals?’.
Was this a better title? It is a matter of opinion but, if someone is interested in antibiotic resistance, the title did not anymore tell that this could be a paper worth reading. On the other hand, if someone was interested in the life of wild animals, that article was probably not what they liked to read.
I do not know whether the new title was to blame but that article got very slowly citations in other scientific articles. Very much against the interest of the journal because journal impact factors were counted using the number of citations papers get within three calendar years since the publication. Journal impact factors are used in the ranking of scientific journals, so very important for the prestige of the journal.
That is really cool. I think I found it. I find it interesting, as with the viral cold and flu season, I’ve had a lot of pushback from miserable patients who want me to give them antibiotics inappropriately. I may use it as a cautionary tale.
Thanks.
Here we test the faeces of moose, deer and vole in Finland and find an almost complete absence of resistance in enterobacteria. Resistance is thus not a universal property of enterobacterial populations, but may be a result of the human use of antibiotics.
Those dropped are already contaminated. You have to take the sample directly from the gut. Unfortunately, to do that the animal has to be recently killed.
Disclaimer: no animals were killed because of this study. Deer and moose were hunted for food, voles had been killed as part of other vole research.
The droppings collected for DNA identification of individuals are another matter. They are collected from nature, without a need to kill any animals.
Here, wolf scats are collected yearly to identify as many individuals as possible from the wolf territories. It is handy - it reveals which individuals live in each territory and when young disperse and establish a new territory, the origin and family history of the individuals in the new territories can be known, if the individuals come from family territories with scat collection history. That also helps to settle disputes about how many wolves live in an area - there are always some hunters claiming that there are much more wolves than the official numbers tell.
An even worse source of antibiotic resistance is the way how cattle are grown in some countries, like USA. To speed growth, antibiotics are regularly fed to cattle and often to pigs. Faster growth but the surroundings are saturated with bacteria having antibiotic resistance. Those bacteria may also spread with the meat, unless the hygiene standards are tight.
Tourist centers in warm countries are another certain source of antibiotic resistance. I once got stomach problems in Egypt and the nearest pharmacy gave the ‘regular’ set for such problems, without any further questions. It included several sorts of antibiotics, including such that are here reserved for cases where the ordinary antibiotics do not anymore work. “Kills everything in the home and garden” was the comment of my wife when she saw the set of antibiotics given to me in the pharmacy (she knows many antibiotics).
Telemedicine’s rise in popularity during COVID also contributed to a lot of inappropriate antibiotic use. Lots of pressure to use antibiotics for viral illnesses and with no real exam or testing. I think Medicare and some states are beginning to tighten up on telemedicine, which is a contentious issue, as some consumers love it and a fair number of docs and NPs make a living off it working from home.
Feedlots and high corn diets make antibiotic use nearly required. An unhealthy environment and an unhealthy diet leads to unhealthy flora, thus unhealthy cattle. It is the industrialization of beef production which keeps costs low on the consumer side. It’s the classic tradeoff between cost and environmental impact.
And yet so many different news article reviews post the exact same claim about the paper.
Google AI even returns the title…so thetheory that humanity came from the same region as Noahs Ark in the bible has clearly gained quite a following. This says to me that its more than a coincidence and that perhaps the bible narrative of the flood has just gained another piece of supporting evidence.
Yep. Perhaps you will start to feel the frustration that scientists feel when science is continually misrepresented by the mass media.
Could there have been ape ancestors from ~9 million years ago that predated the split between chimps and humans evolved outside of Africa? Sure, it’s possible. I don’t see how this really changes all of the post-split human evolution that happened in Africa. I also don’t see how an 8.7 million year old ape fossil in Turkey has anything to do with Noah’s flood.
You are so certain that the bible narrative of Noahs Ark must be wrong that even when you own science comes up with evidences that support the biblical notion that humanity restarted from a small group of individuals in Turkey, you refuse to entertain the idea…it cant be right…it must be media hype…the essence of the article misread…and yet even Google AI returns the claim…so its clearly far more than just media hype.
Btw…isnt the entire US election system of counting based on media? You obviously dont believe the election results in the US…it must have been the kabal…or was it the Rothschilds who put Trump in again😂
The fossil isn’t human. Not even close. It is also 8.7 million years old, a bit too old for when Noah’s flood is said to have happened.
From the article:
This is an ape fossil that could be ancestral to the whole great ape group, not just humans. So your scenario would need the evolution of at least gorillas, chimps, and humans from this ancestor.
The point is, if the Turkey specimen is older than Africa, then that aligns with the bible claim all life after the flood came out of the mountains of Ararat.
Trying to make the criticism…but its evolutionary and Adam doesnt believe evolution is irrelevant.
Why would finding an ape fossil in Turkey indicate that all life after the flood came out of the mountains of Ararat? If we find an ape fossil in Africa, does that falsify your claims? What would falsify your flood model?
When COVID finally got me I was told antibiotics were mandatory for anyone over 70, but those 55 - 69 got a choice. The reasoning was that the elderly are at high risk of bacterial pneumonia.
I skipped the antibiotics.
So now you think the Ark happened almost nine million years ago???
Greetings, Adam. Thanks for the discussion. It may help to refer to a similar question based on 2017 evidence from Crete (“con-Crete” evidence?) in Biologos’ main site:
It has always been assumed that the last common ancestor to the ape and human lines lived somewhere in Africa. The simple reason for this is that Africa is where we find our closest relatives, the gorillas and chimpanzees. The field of genetics has provided the best evidence yet of our common ancestry with modern great apes The genetic similarity between humans and chimpanzees is 99.4%. Furthermore, humans and great apes have a large number of shared errors and mutations in their genetic codes.
Also bolstering this view is the almost continuous discoveries of early humans (taxonomically known as “hominins”) in north and east Africa, that have pushed the precursors of the genus Homo back to at least six million years ago, living in modern-day Kenya. While this evidence is incomplete, skeletal fragments indicate that by this time, our ancestors were likely walking on two legs.
But these finds represent populations of hominins that have evolved since the common ancestor. When did this event take place? The most recent research has settled on a date of at least seven or eight million years ago and possibly as early as thirteen million years ago.
Doesn’t prove anything. News outlets only produce very similar articles and headlines because they get their stories from news syndication sites such as Reuters and Associated Press, and those in turn get their stories from university PR departments, which themselves have incentives to make research sound more important than it is because they want to attract better students, better researchers, and more grant money. Every step in the chain will have its own incentives to inflate the importance and significance of the research, in order to attract better students, better researchers, and more grant money.
As for Google AI, it is trained on pop-sci news sites and only regurgitates information (and misinformation) that’s already out there. So that proves nothing either.
The bottom line: you MUST go back to the original peer reviewed papers to get an accurate account of the research.ESPECIALLY if the claim concerned is an extraordinary one that purports to overturn the consensus of large amounts of existing scientific research.
