The Fox Terrier Problem

Yesterday I mentioned that Benjamin D'Israeli had a Fox Terrier for a pet and that, as a breed, they led to an interesting discovery in the world of science writing. 

And, as promised, here's the story ...

The late biologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould was a great campaigner to have evolution taught in American schools. As both a Christian and a scientist, he abhorred the idea that knowledge and truth be subjugated by a twisted version of his own beliefs. 

But while he was researching the subject he discovered subtle but undeniable truth-bending in schoolbooks – even in those schools where evolution was taught. For example, some books stated that giraffes had evolved their long necks so that they could reach the leaves at the tops of trees. This was patent nonsense because it presupposed that there was some kind of deliberate plan to grow longer necks. In other words, the books were hinting at intentional design and, therefore, a designer. The truth is that the long neck probably evolved by way of advantageous mutation; the giraffes born with slightly longer necks and legs saw the predator first and got a head start. Therefore, their mutant ‘long neck’ and ‘long leg’ genes survived to be passed on to successive generations. And, of course, the process took many millions of years. The by-product was that giraffes could avail themselves of a food source that others couldn’t reach.

He also found evidence that human evolution was being described to schoolkids as a form of constant improvement; that we were getting more and more advanced as if there was a set goal to be reached. Again, the fossil record disputes this. We are the way we are because of environment, predator/prey relationships, food supply, natural selection and sexual selection. Evolution is not some predetermined march from primate to divinity. A subtle difference in the way the Earth worked a few million years ago and we’d probably still be up in the trees. Unfortunately, this idea of linear progression was firmly embedded in the public mind in the 1970s when Time Life books published a volume called Early Man with this now iconic (and wholly inaccurate) image:

You've probably seen variants on that image many many times. It's completely misleading but it established an idea in people's minds - that of 'the march of progress'. It quickly became the standard way to depict evolution in action. Here it is in an illustration about the development of horses. And it is just as wrong as the Zallinger illustration above.

The animal at the start of the parade is Hyracotherium (or Eohippus as it was called in older textbooks). This was a primitive ancestor of the horse. Physically, it looked quite like a horse, except that it had toes instead of hooves, and was considerably smaller than any modern species - about the size of a Fox Terrier in fact (remember that fact - we'll come back to it). 

Most science books showed the gradual evolution of the horse from Hyracotherium to modern Equus by way of a series of intermediate species, each getting bigger and bigger and the toes gradually resolving into the single toed hoof. However, that's not how the horse evolved. The truth is that each species would diversify into a range of new species and maybe one or two of those would survive to evolve again. The evolution of the horse looks more like a tree with lots of dead branches rather than a single line of constant improvement. 

This is a more realistic depiction of the evolution of the horse:

Then there’s that reference to Hyracotherium being the size of a Fox Terrier that I mentioned. 

Gould found that comparison in almost every school science book he read. But when he actually came to think about it, he realised that he had absolutely no idea what a Fox Terrier looked like, nor how big it was. Nor did anyone he knew, which suggested that the people who’d written these books probably didn’t either. And that suggested that all of these books had been put together simply by the author copying the description from previous books. 

Gould's investigations showed that the first appearance of the Fox Terrier comparison was made as long ago as 1904 when an American palaeontologist called Henry Fairfield Osborne wrote an article called 'The evolution of the horse in America' in Century Magazine. In the article we find this line: 

‘We may imagine the earliest herds of horses in the lower Eocene as resembling a lot of Fox-Terriers in size …’ 

And, for nearly a hundred years thereafter, this description was copied and re-copied by lazy researchers who never actually bothered to find out what size Hyracotherium actually was. Meanwhile the popularity of the Fox Terrier waned until it was no longer a common breed ... but still the comparison continued to be used until, in the modern day, it's almost useless. 

Gould concluded that if people want the ‘right’ to publish facts and figures, they should produce original material for themselves or, at least, go back to the original source instead of relying on quick and easy data that may be a 10th generation (and often inaccurately cloned) source. 

There's a lesson there for the internet age. Most kids go straight to Google when they have homework to do. And I wonder how often they bother to check the veracity of the facts they find? And, as overworked and underpaid as they are, it would be an exceptional teacher who did it for them. 

All of which makes me wonder what life will be like 50 years from now. Will we be a society of people who take everything we read online as Gospel? 

If so, The Enlightenment was all for nothing.