Carl Zimmer points out the error in our science journalism ways when we try to coax scientists to say their latest apish find is a “missing link”:

Now, if you learned about human origins 50 years ago, you might well have read things by scientists referring to a missing link in our evolution. The great paleoanthropologist Robert Broom even published a book in 1951 called Finding the Missing Link. But this was a time when so few fossils were known from human evolution that many researchers thought that our ancestry was pretty much linear until you got back to our common ancestor with other living apes. But fifty years later, it’s abundantly clear now that human evolution has produced many branches, all but one of which have ended in extinction. Some are close to our own ancestry, others are further away. Paleoanthropologists don’t get excited about a fossil because they think they’ve found the missing link (whatever that is), but because a fossil can show how early a trait such as a big brain evolved, and sometimes can even reveal traits that have evolved independently several times in evolution. That’s what gets them fired up about Pierolapithecus catalaunicus. So why shouldn’t journalists get fired up as well, rather than trotting out old cliches?

(That’s the award-winning Carl Zimmer, whose writing is so gentle and effortless that when you read him you feel like you’re sitting down for a cup of coffee with an old friend. Well deserved.)

Just finished Charles Wohlforth’s The Whale and the Supercomputer, a terrific read on a number of levels.

It is the story of climate change from the point of view of the people along the arctic who are living in its midst, woven with the research community trying to understand climate change as current fact and future implication.

Wohlforth straddles well the worlds of the native whalers, the global climate modelers and the armies of climate researchers trying to gather the data needed to stitch the whole climate story together.

To me, the most interesting thing was the way, like Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire, Wohlforth leads us along on his own journey to understand and explain.

There’s a marvelous moment when he’s trying to sort out the complexities of federal funding for arctic research – Wohlforth frankly admits, “I didn’t hope to know the truth of the matter. As a machine for spending money, Washington was as complex and inscrutable as an ecological system.” Intellectual humility – a characteristic to be prized.

Michael Fumento has shown up again on the radar, this time on the stem cell debate, once again basing one of his op-ed pieces on a misprepresentation.

In it, Fumento accuses Chris Mooney of making “the illogical argument that since some people prefer adult stem cells for non-scientific reasons, they must therefore have little scientific value.” Once again, thanks to the Internet, you can read Mooney’s Washington Monthly piece yourself and decided whether Fumento has accurately characterized Mooney’s argument. Hint: think straw man. Mooney argues that opponents of embryonic stem cell research have improperly hyped adult stem cells as an alternative. But Mooney never argues that adult stem cells “have little scientific value.” Read it for yourself.

The MIchael Fumento/Bowie Poag analogy that David noted seems so apt. You just can’t make up stuff this good.

Fumento has had a change of heart. After piling onto the Lancet researchers for pumping up the Iraqi death toll by using data from deadly Falluja, now he’s accusing those pro-terrorist medical researchers of not including the Falluja data.

If you’ll recall when last we met, our hero was taking down those evil bounders from the British medical journal Lancet (“Al-Jazeera on the Thames,” as he so daringly put it) for their study on deaths in Iraq. It seems that, by including data gathered in Falluja, the evil Lancetteers had biased their study, like “determining how much of a nation’s population wears dentures by surveying only nursing homes.”

When any number of people helpfully pointed out to Lambert that he was wrong, and that the Lancetteers had excluded the Falluja data as an outlier – they apparently didn’t want the equivalent of a nursing home full of denture wearers throwing off their data – Fumento dug in his heels. “Find in the paper where they provide an equivalent to the 100,000 figure but exclude Falluja deaths,” (emphasis added) our Superhero of the New Science-Based Right thundered.

Several people showed him. Again. So Fumento changed tack, now accusing the Lancetthajadeen of not including numbers based on the Falluja data.

As Lambert points out, we now have this nicely summed up in a single comment thread over on Eye Doc’s blog.

Fumento I: “The authors claimed to have come up with one set of numbers including Falluja, another without. But strangely, they never present the ‘without numbers.'”

Fumento II: “The study did not present numbers that included Falluja, either in the abstract or text. Yet they accuse ME of not reading it.”

Here’s the full pertinent paragraph from the Lancet study (emphasis added):

Evidence suggests that the mortality rate was higher across Iraq after the war than before, even excluding Falluja. We estimate that there were 98 000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000 194 000) during the post-war period in the 97% of Iraq represented by all the clusters except Falluja. In our Falluja sample, we recorded 53 deaths when only 1?4 were expected under the national pre-war rate. This indicates a point estimate of about 200 000 excess deaths in the 3% of Iraq represented by this cluster. However, the uncertainty in this value is substantial and implies additional deaths above those measured in the rest of the country.

In other words, they did the with-Falluja calculation – “200,000 excess deaths” – but responsibly threw it out as an outlier, because they didn’t want the equivalent of a nursing home biasing their data on how many people wear dentures.