Federally funded study of ducks’ reproductive evolution ignites a media controversy
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2434
A recent media hubbub about some curiosity-driven basic research invites this retelling of what British physicist J. J. Thomson explained at the violent height of World War I: Surgeons’ medical imaging, the Nobel laureate said, ‘was not the result of a research in applied science to find an improved method of locating bullet wounds. This might have led to improved probes, but we cannot imagine it leading to the discovery of the X-rays. No, this method is due to an investigation in pure science, made with the object of discovering what is the nature of Electricity.’
This spring’s hubbub—mixing smirks, tittering, mockery, and assertive earnestness—engages an investigation in pure science made with the object of understanding certain anatomical and evolutionary complexities of duck sex.
Here’s a partial pre-hubbub timeline:
* 2007: With colleagues, Patricia L. R. Brennan—then at Yale University and also Sheffield University in the UK—published ‘Coevolution of male and female genital morphology in waterfowl ’ in PLoS ONE.
* 2007: Smirk-free science news articles from the New York Times , the Economist , and Fox News reported on Brennan’s work. Fox’s long, detailed piece began by observing that ‘a sexual arms race waged with twisted genitals has been discovered in waterfowl’ and ended by quoting positive summary observations from an evolutionary biologist and an ornithologist.
* 2009: At Nature, the smirk-free news report ‘The sex wars of ducks: An evolutionary battle against unwanted fertilization’ cited the 2007 PLoS ONE paper and a 2009 paper by Brennan and colleagues published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B .
* 2011: The Brennan 2009 paper was cited in Journal of Animal Science .
* 2012: Brennan and a colleague published a related waterfowl biology paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B .
In 2013 Brennan’s work, funded by NSF, has come under high-visibility political attack.
Human Events, which describes itself as presenting ‘powerful conservative voices,’ published the article ‘Austerity! Feds spend $400,000 to study duck genitals.’ An article from conservative CNSNews.com has drawn widespread attention. At Fox News, where Brennan’s work had been reported extensively and seriously in 2007, Sean Hannity mocked it and criticized its NSF funding.
A Fox online poll asked, ‘Was duck penis study proper use of taxpayer money?’ Fox offered three possible answers and reported the response percentages:
Yes. Sure, it sounds silly, but these studies produce real and useful scientific information. 4.49%
No–what a quack! A government looking to cut back shouldn’t be wasting money on anything like this. 86.77%
Maybe. We need to fund scientific research, but perhaps now’s not the best time for bird-brained studies like this. 8.73%
At MSNBC , commentator Chris Hayes defended Brennan’s work and—without mentioning Thomson—defended the principle that Thomson enunciated in 1916. Hayes attacked what he called ‘ignorant mockery’ from the political right. Another defense appeared at National Geographic . At Slate, Brennan herself—now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst—offered a vigorous defense of her own under the headline ‘Why I study duck genitalia: Fox News and other conservative sites miss the point of basic science.’
The 9 April Washington Post carried a Style section front-page report on the hubbub, together with an online video . The piece makes the point that the controversy recurs periodically and almost always leaves serious scientists feeling unheard and unfairly treated.
But despite the Post piece’s intent to portray research dynamics accurately, it tosses in elements of the mockery. The print version appears under the smirking headline ‘Just ducky: Public funds to examine private parts—researcher answers critics by promoting weird science.’ The caption for the online video refers to ‘oddball experiments.’ The online headline mentions ‘oddball science.’ In part simply to report the outlook of mockers, the piece itself twice refers to Brennan as the ‘nutty professor.’
Brennan is having none of it. Her Slate piece reflects a statement she made for the Post: ‘This mockery of science has to stop. It just has to stop. These are people who just don’t understand science at all.’
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.