Science journalism

[Steve Pinker]

I suspect that there is a selective memory effect at work here;
researchers are annoyed at the reports in the popular press that
present an opinion that *they* don't like, and assume that their own
opinions must be too subtle for journalists and the public to grasp.
I've had the same annoyance, but over different articles, so we can't
all be right about journalistic bias.  Remember all those reports
about how the Safran et al. study showed that contrary to what
linguists believe, language is learned?  What about language
impairment being cured by video games that train phoneme
discrimination?  The infinitely plastic brain which can do anything if
it's stimulated in the first three years? Chimpanzees, gorillas, and
parrots with language? etc.

My sense is that the problem is not that journalists find some ideas
easier to understand, but that they driven by science *news*, not
science. 90% of science journalists work this way: they subscribe to
Science, Nature, NEJM, JAMA, and a few other news-oriented journals,
or scan the press releases, and write a story on the issue's report
with the most accessible punch line. That's what their editors insist
on: they want what was discovered *yesterday*, not what has emerged as
a consensus or a line of thought over the past few years.  When was
the last time you read an article in the newspaper about a paper that
just came out in Psychological Bulletin, or the Behavioral and Brain
Sciences?

As for evolutionary psychology and the UK: I get all the clippings,
and can assure everyone that neither the British press nor the
opnion-makers are biased toward Darwinist explanations of
behavior. The opinion pages are filled with denunciations of
Darwinism, often vitriolic, including ones by people in Tony Blair's
inner circle.

Pascal Boyer, incidentally, does not believe in an innate module for
witches or religion -- quite the opposite; he argues for religion
being a by-product. Lewis Wolpert is a distinguished embryologist;
much of his popular science writing is excellent, but he can be glib
and flippant when writing about psychology and the social sciences, as
Chris Sinha's letter points out.

--Steve