[dkarl]

I think this researcher had his "science journalist" hat on when he wrote the article. It's a formulaic piece of science journalism, complete with the touch of "most biologists are wrong about something that you, the layperson reader, will realize the truth about after five minutes of tenth grade-level reading." "Most biologists" here might as well be replaced with Mos'blogist, the mythical God of Wrongness, whom we invoke when we want to get excited about learning something new. "Mommy, I don't want to read about evolution." "But I have something here that Mos'blogist doesn't knowwwww! Don't you want to be smarter than Mos'blogist?" "Yay, mommy, I love getting the jump on Mos'blogist!"

Yes, Virginia, "most biologists," who get their news from Nature and Cell, are sadly lagging behind laypeople who read the New York Times. Is it any wonder people have so little faith in scientists? I think science journalists have a responsibility to highlight the fallibility of scientists and the flaws of the scientific process, but it is not public-minded criticism to make your readers believe that the majority of scientists working in an area are too dense to understand something that an average person can understand from a newspaper article, or already did understand if they read a single pop science book about evolution in the last several decades. That's just pandering.

Now, we could make the same mistake and assume that we, who do not write science journalism, have noticed something about it that one of its most successful practitioners (published in the New York Times, after all) never has. Or we could assume he understands it better than we do and does this shit on purpose because he likes being published.