Sensationalising science...indeed.

Sometimes I wonder if the people in charge of doing layout on news website actually pay attention to which headlines they're putting next to each other. Like on the BBC site yesterday, on the Science/Nature page they had an article titled Media 'sensationalising science' along with Family may provide evolution clue. (Although that wasn't as bad as another website which wrote about the Turkish family whose kids had ataxia as “Backward evolution” spawns ape-like people.)

Labeling this as "backward evolution" has got to be one of the stupidest things I've heard recently. It's one family - when 2 normal people have a kid with, say, achondroplasia, nobody calls it humans evolving into a race of hobbits^*, even though it's a new mutation that will be passed on to the child's offspring. Sure, it would be super cool if it did turn out that the mutation this family has is a reversion to something that existed before in the human genetic timeline.

But it would also be as simple to assume for now that it's something that's screwed up in a novel way, and that the kids who can't walk simply figured out that this would be an easier way to get around than struggling with crutches. Especially since they're in a rural area where they don't have to deal with mocking strangers and broken glass on the pavements.

There seems to be a lot of inconsistency between reports - the "World Science" site makes them out to be total basket cases, whereas the BBC says that the women can do crochet and embroidery, which is pretty damn impressive since lots of bipedal people can't do needlework to save their lives. MRI scans of some of the family members showed that they have "a form of" cerebellar ataxia (FYI for non-bio people, the cerebellum is the part of the brain that coordinates movement). Anyway, given that that they apparently live out in the country, mental retardation may not be the disaster for their parents that it would be for, say, a rich urban couple. Because if the kids are still capable of earning their keep by helping in the house and on the farm, they can be functional members of the community - it's not an environment where conformity requires getting into an Ivy League school. (See Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down for why medical anthropology is important when bringing Western medicine into a Third World setting.)

Alamak, oi. I feel sorry for this family because the hype surrounding them reminds me of spectators watching 19th-century sideshow freaks. One gets the impression that some big-talking American "philanthropist" is about to swoop down on their little village and transport them to the New World in cages to be poked and prodded. Give them a break lah, you idiots with the cameras.

Someone from the BBC team who filmed them said that the family had "tremendous warmth and humanity". Yah and you're taking enormous advantage of their warmth and humanity by calling them pithecanthropi. Nice job, people.

* Although the discovery of Homo floresiensis did make a lot of LOTR fans happy last year...