Creation Moment 2/10/2017 - Fake "News"

"One reporter in a campus Press Relations office shouldn’t be able to influence the world’s view of

science.
Look at this over-the-top headline from Cambridge University: “Bag-like sea creature was humans’ oldest known ancestor.” I mean, really. Come on. This is your daddy?

You’re not looking at a medieval helmet, but an artist’s impression of a “microscopic, bag-like sea creature, which lived about 540 million years ago,” according to some anonymous reporter in the Cambridge press office with a hyperactive imagination. The tiny fossil, about 1 millimeter in diameter, was found in China by sifting through sand. Exaggerations that this represents a ‘human ancestor’ should be subject to swift reproach by reasonable scientists. But they weren’t. Instead, all the world’s media immediately jumped to promote this new ‘finding of science,’ differing only in the creativity of their own over-the-top headlines and how much they enlarged the original artwork.

• Scientists find ‘oldest human ancestor’ (Pallab Ghosh at the BBC News)
• Tiny, 540-Million-Year-Old Human Ancestor Didn’t Have an Anus (Laura Geggel at Live Science)
• Ancestor of all vertebrates was a big mouth with no anus (New Scientist staff and press association). This report claims that the conical structures are precursors of fish gills.
• This bag-like thing is your ancestor (Fox News Science)

The normally-conservative Fox News story even includes a video with four excited young reporters gushing over how this 1-millimeter organism that hid among grains of sand hundreds of millions of Darwin Years ago is “our great-granddaddy” that “plays a key role in evolution” and shows “the evolutionary connections we have to animals that don’t look like us at all.” Not a word of skepticism can be found in any of these reports, even though the original paper in Nature says nothing about ‘ancestor’ or ‘human.’ Co-author Simon Conway Morris, a Cambrian fossil expert, would probably disdain any such characterization.

A welcome breath of skepticism appeared on the American Council on Science and Health website. In “How to Spot a Fake Science News Story,” Alex Berezow rips into the mess that science journalism has become." CEH

A faithful witness will not lie:

but a false witness will utter lies.

Proverbs 14:5