Bonnet, meet bee
Speaking of science... the painfully funny expose of British tabloid hypocrisy over the BNP included a headline which caught my eye:
Why blue-eyed boys (and girls) are so brilliant, Daily Mail 20 August 2007
I was immediately curious about how much of the Mail's report was true. What did researcher Joanne Rowe actually find, and what did she actually say?
Now, the Mail's piece was the basis of a news.com.au report, which was the basis of a foxnews.com report. Fox still runs the story with a misleading headline - Study: Blue-Eyed People 'Smarter' than Brown-Eyed - but compare the actual content of the pieces. The Mail goes on and on about blue-eyed superiority at studying and exams, but there's no mention of academic achievement in the Fox piece: the studies were actually about performance in different sporting activities. The bit about exams appears to have been invented by the Mail out of whole cloth.
While two of Rowe's older papers on the subject pop right up in PubMed, there's no sign of more recent research by her, nor of a review article (that is, an article discussing previous research). Fox refers to two studies of professional sportspersons, neither of which are Rowe's 1992 and 1994 papers in Perceptual & Motor Skills. What, then, was the basis of the Daily Mail story? A press release from the University of Louisville? An unpublished paper? A paper in a non-refereed journal, or a journal not indexed by PubMed? When I next get the chance to pop in to the uni library, I'll have a poke around in other databases - in particular, I'll check Science Citation Index to see if the '92 and '94 papers have been cited by a more recent review.
Until I get my hands on the original paper (or whatever it was), it's impossible to know just how much Rowe's views were misrepresented. But let me speculate. Fox quotes Rowe's email: "There is so much more to a person's make up and their achievements in life." I can't help wondering if that's part of a response to the Mail article - possibly by an embarrassed and appalled academic. Poking around in PubMed, it seems clear the evidence for any correlation between eye colour and reactions is very slight - one of Rowe's own studies found no link. I think it's also fairly obvious that this sort of research is open to misuse or distortion. But I bet you a buck that Rowe never imagined just how much distortion.
Why blue-eyed boys (and girls) are so brilliant, Daily Mail 20 August 2007
I was immediately curious about how much of the Mail's report was true. What did researcher Joanne Rowe actually find, and what did she actually say?
Now, the Mail's piece was the basis of a news.com.au report, which was the basis of a foxnews.com report. Fox still runs the story with a misleading headline - Study: Blue-Eyed People 'Smarter' than Brown-Eyed - but compare the actual content of the pieces. The Mail goes on and on about blue-eyed superiority at studying and exams, but there's no mention of academic achievement in the Fox piece: the studies were actually about performance in different sporting activities. The bit about exams appears to have been invented by the Mail out of whole cloth.
While two of Rowe's older papers on the subject pop right up in PubMed, there's no sign of more recent research by her, nor of a review article (that is, an article discussing previous research). Fox refers to two studies of professional sportspersons, neither of which are Rowe's 1992 and 1994 papers in Perceptual & Motor Skills. What, then, was the basis of the Daily Mail story? A press release from the University of Louisville? An unpublished paper? A paper in a non-refereed journal, or a journal not indexed by PubMed? When I next get the chance to pop in to the uni library, I'll have a poke around in other databases - in particular, I'll check Science Citation Index to see if the '92 and '94 papers have been cited by a more recent review.
Until I get my hands on the original paper (or whatever it was), it's impossible to know just how much Rowe's views were misrepresented. But let me speculate. Fox quotes Rowe's email: "There is so much more to a person's make up and their achievements in life." I can't help wondering if that's part of a response to the Mail article - possibly by an embarrassed and appalled academic. Poking around in PubMed, it seems clear the evidence for any correlation between eye colour and reactions is very slight - one of Rowe's own studies found no link. I think it's also fairly obvious that this sort of research is open to misuse or distortion. But I bet you a buck that Rowe never imagined just how much distortion.