Bad Biology

Junk science

The egregious idiocies of creationism and medical fraud should top anyone's top-ten list of bad biology, but there's rich seam of seemingly more superficial mistakes that betray a more fundamental lack of biological nouse. A lot of these examples are taken from an ever-reliable scientifically-illiterate media, although exam specifications come a depressing second. You might also like to see bad astronomy, bad archaeology, bad meteorology and bad science.

Antibiotics are cold comfort

Getting overheated about calling spiders insects may be a little tragic - and most people will have had this corrected by a well meaning pedant at some point anyway - but this is the well-known tip of a larger berg of classificatory silliness, some of which is pretty serious. At the less worrisome end, according to a rental agreement I signed a few years back:

the tenant shall not keep or permit to be kept any animal bird or reptile on the premises

Beside the painful legalese (what do lawyers have against commas?), what, pray tell, is a bird if it is not an animal? Is it a vegetable? I think not. What I presume they meant was no mammal, rather than no animal. It's about time people realised these are not the same thing. Apart from anything else, it could well be argued that they meant 'mammal' in the contract, and therefore there's nothing wrong with the tenant keeping giant centipedes, cane toads or hives of killer bees.

Humans get excessively special treatment in school text books. One I used a few years back asked children to label all the 'people and animals' in a diagram, when what they meant was really 'people and other animals'. The depressingly common 'humans are descended from apes' is also much better put as 'humans are apes', since chimps and bonobos are most closely related to us that they are to gorillas, gibbons and orangutans. I'm not asking kids to be able to perform parsimony analysis, but this 'humans are a special creation' nonsense has to stop.

Philosophical objections to considering humans to be somehow separate from the rest of the brutes aside, there are some classificatory mistakes that are genuinely serious, in the sense of life (rather than intellect) threatening. In the last five years I have seen 'the E. coli virus' (λ-phage, presumably), 'the virus that causes Chlamydia' and 'the Cryptosporidium bacteria'; some in print, some on news channels that really ought to know better. This blithering stupidity is genuinely getting the human race into real trouble:

Escherichia coli
Escherichia coli. Will respond to antibiotics, but won't like you misspelling its name.

If you must insist on not knowing the difference, then just call them 'bugs' or something, although then you'll get in trouble with the entomologists, who will unreasonably suggest that a bug is an insect with a sucky bit. Ah well, can't please all of the biologists all of the time. One last (and if I'm honest, trivial) classificatory irritation is the media's inability to use Latin names in a way that doesn't make them look stupid. Most organisms have common names, like 'humans', 'hemp' and 'anthrax'. If you want to add spurious scientific credence to a report by using Latin, for the love of Cicero, get it right: homo 'Sapiens', Cannabis Sativa and mycobacteria Tuberculosis just make you look illiterate. A capital letter on the first word, a small letter on the second, and all of it in italics. That's it. It's not rocket science. Homo sapiens, Cannabis sativa, Bacillus anthracis. Done.

Movies under the microscope

Films, as you might expect, provide rich pickings for the spotter of bad science in all its guises, and it would be exhausting and pointless to list every last item. However, there are two particularly irritating mistakes that recur time and time again.

How many times have you seen people in films looking down microscopes at living viruses or bacteria multiplying under a microscope? Whilst it is quite possible to watch bacteria multiplying under a microscope (although the images would be much poorer than most miraculous movie microscopes), it is impossible to watch viruses multiply under one. Not only do they only multiply inside their host cells (so you couldn't see them anyway) but they are almost all far, far too small to look at with a conventional light microscope: anything smaller than about 400 nm is impossible to see with a light microscope. 'So why don't we use an electron microscope instead? After all they look much cooler than real microscopes', asks some clever film executive.

HIV, not multiplying.
Exceptionally dead HIV viruses (although technically, they were never alive anyway).

Well, mostly because anything put in an electron microscope is not only dead, but quite likely also frozen solid, set in a lump of plastic and/or coated with gold, much like Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger. The last thing anything capable of magnifying bacteria or viruses enough will be able to do is show them crawling around, as they are dead as rocks by this point. It's also impossible to get colour images with an electron microscope, so the next time you see bright orange viruses, crawling about under an electron microscope, have a little cringe.

The wishful-thinking of movie script-writers when it comes to technology can be sharply contrasted with their complete unimaginativeness when designing alien life. How can X-phile alien abductee nutters be so excitingly deluded as to imagine being anally probed by aliens from Tau Ceti, whilst simultaneously being so dull and unimaginative as to always imagine the aliens as being short grey humans with big eyes? On this planet, we are the brightest organisms around. However, not that far behind are such different looking things as legless dolphins, winged parrots and furry chimpanzees. For that matter, the social insects are considerably better organised than we are. So why do alien abductees claim that aliens look basically like badly-drawn humans? The chances of something on another planet evolving to look almost exactly like us are somewhat slim, particularly if that planet has a methane atmosphere, is entirely submerged in liquid ethane, has silicon based life forms, etc. The lack of imagination of alien abductees has a lot more to do with they sheer dullness of most movie and TV aliens, than in our infiltration by the Greys.

Look away now girls, here comes the science

Besides the grotesque sexism of this advert and its ilk, the science in cosmetic adverts is somewhat questionable to say the least. Now, I'm all for pretty pictures and swirly graphics in their place, but if I see one more shiny, pointy ended hair made fabulous and smooth by the application of Fiddle Spittoon's Inteseef™ Nutrimicious Hair Food, I will scream. Here is a real hair.

Blunt human hair.

Note that it is scaly and blunt and rather unattractive. No amount of provitamin X, β-capricious vegetable alcohol and Fishy Bush oil is going to sharpen the end of hairs, which after all, the owner has probably spent rather a lot of cash on having sliced off neatly once a month.

α-Hydroxy fruits acids are what lemon juice and milk that's gone off are made of. At high concentrations they will burn your skin off (a chemical peel, which genuinely will reduce wrinkles, but is best handled by a cosmetic surgeon); at low concentrations, the best they will do is irritate your skin. Liposomes are what we less educated people call blobs of grease. Polyphenols (or poliffinols, as L'Orifice insist on calling them) are responsible for the brown colour that forms when you let apples hang around for a while. Wheat protein (better known as gluten or seitan) is made from strong flour, and gives coeliacs diarrhoea. Micro fruit waxes are a linguistic nonsense: are they waxes from very, very small fruits, or tiny balls of wax from more averagely proportioned fruits? If we strip out the nonsense, here are the basic recipes for:

I wouldn't recommend you using any of these, but since all cosmetics now need a list of ingredients on them, you can actually see what you're getting. Here's a dictionary to convert the chemistry to English:

The vast majority of these 'natural science' wonder-ingredients are greases, soaps, pointless, or the cosmetic equivalents of E-numbers. Moisturisers make your skin plump and slightly less wrinkly by reducing the evaporation of water. There is very little silk proteins, liposomes and ceramides can do that wouldn't be done just as well (if more stickily) by Vaseline.

The great gene debacle

In the sixties and seventies, all superheros were created by being bitten, bombed or buggered by radioactive spiders and nukes. However, these days, superheros can only be made by DNA transplants, or from the bite of genetically meddled-with spiders. OK, so movies are all about the suspension of disbelief, so I can let that slide, but there's one incredibly annoying, recurring plot device, which has any self-respecting molecular biologist cringing even more forcefully than IT professional do when they hear that irritating kid in Jurassic Park say "Oh, it's UNIX: I know UNIX".

How many times have you seen a double helix spinning on computer screen whilst someone waxes lyrical about the gene sequence? No molecular biologist would ever do this: it's surprising how desperately uninformative a raw gene sequence is, and looking at it as a raw swirl of nucleotides is quite thoroughly pointless.

DNA.
"It's DNA, oh, I know DNA".

What molecular biologists actually look at all day is agarose gels, CHROMAS sequence reports, and homology searches off of BLAST. The latter aren't terribly visually exciting, but the gels don't look too bad, and I fervently wish that the next time I see someone waffling about mutation or DNA or similar, that they were looking at a gel rather than some stupid (and ineptly rendered) spinning double-helix.

Agarose gel.
You can get them in colour too.

However, my favourite bit of tiresome DNA idiocy is the continuous dragging up the nature versus nurture debate in every documentary or news discussion of genetics. Unbelievably, there are still people who actually think that this debate is controversial. Every (and I mean every) characteristic of a human being is under the influence of both their genes and their environment. Saying anything is purely black or white, nature or nurture, is ridiculous. The precise shade of grey (the character's 'heritability') is interesting to investigate, but saying that (for example) human nature is purely a consequence of genes to the exclusion of society or vice versa is untenable and unhelpful.

Unnatural abnormality

At the moment, there's a debate concerning cloning technologies. It's not the efficacy or even the morality of the technology I'm concerned with here, it's the cry from the media and the religious that cloning animals is unnatural.

Several species of lizard reproduce parthenogenetically.
A lizard. Several species of lizard (Cnemidophorus spp.) reproduce parthenogenetically, without recourse to sex, producing identical copies of themselves. That is, they are clones.

All bacteria, most plants, many aphids, some stick-insects, many of the cute little things called rotifers, and even a few lizards clone themselves, but cloning things is still obviously unnatural.

Perhaps not. OK, so cloning must be unnatural for humans. In which case, if you are an identical twin, you should hang your freakish head in shame. Especially as you will likely have shared the same upbringing too, making you even more similar to your sibling than you would've been if you'd been sensibly separated at birth. At least a human clone would be brought up in a marginally different environment from that of its 'parent'.

Is cloning unnatural? Well, maybe it is for our species, but then so is eating our food cooked, using vaccinations and wearing clothes. Calling things 'unnatural' or 'abnormal' is little more than a snobbish way of going 'eurgh, that's icky'.

There are some uses of the word 'natural' that may be defensible; the sense of 'not made by humans' is OK, although humans are themselves a natural product of evolution, so 'artificial' is really more a special case of 'natural', rather than the opposite of it. In either case, bread is unnatural: it's a biotechnology product made by artificially grinding the seeds of artificially-selected grasses, letting them rot with an artificial inoculum of artificially-selected fungus, then burning them slowly in an artificially controlled way. Our staple foods are very unnatural, to pretend otherwise degrades the word 'natural' to something utterly meaningless.

The cry of 'abnormal' and 'unnatural' seems to be a common one whenever something interesting, novel or challenging is developed. Perhaps scientists ought to be better communicators, and more interested in the applications and implications of their work, rather than having the 'we do it because we can' attitude. (Although I have to say, that stereotype doesn't actually fit most scientist at all well). More pertinently, perhaps the public ought to avoid sitting in a centrally heated room, eating microwaved food imported by air-freight, and complaining that the cloning they've just heard about on their television is unnatural.