In Response To: "We Still Haven't Explained Pink"

The ScienceBlogs hosted blog, Pharyngula, recently posted “We still haven’t explained pink.” The post, written by Dr. PZ Meyers, is a response to an article on Discovery news stating that women are genetically predisposed to prefer the color pink. The post author, refutes the statements of the Discovery news article, citing poor scientific rationale. Dr. Meyers breaks his argument into multiple parts. He states pink has always been associated with girls, so as a result, the distinction is assumed. However, he shows evidence the distinction has only been present for the baby boomer generation. Meyers then continues by refuting the theory from a paper stating that the preference for pink is evolutionary. The author then furthers his argument by citing and explaining another academic paper with the inclusion of graphs.

Dr. Meyer’s blog is clearly directed towards a scientifically educated audience. The plain graphics and poor Web 2.0 implementation clearly do not strive to attract the curious browsing visitor. The overall cluttered and relatively unattractive design of the blog makes it apparent the audience is attracted by content rather than visual appeal. The same conclusion can be drawn when looking at the title of the post, “We still haven’t explained pink”. The title does not exaggerate the content of the post and therefore has no pretensions to grab the reader in with a catchy (but misleading) title. Looking further at the post itself, Dr. Meyer writes with the assumption that the reader has an understanding of the theory of evolution and scientific arguments. From all of this, it can be assumed that the audience of this blog is well educated with a strong interest in the natural sciences.

Throughout the post, Dr. Meyers sharply criticizes the quality of reporting from a number of mainstream media sources such as Time magazine. He uses harsh language, citing a paper as “disappointing tripe” or referring to the Discovery news article as “the terrible evpsych rationale […] that just made no sense.” It is evident from his language that Meyers holds a disdain towards the relatively uninformed mass-market media. This addresses an important issue of science; its inaccurate portrayal by the mainstream media. It is an issue that is little addressed so it is commendable that Meyers writes about it. Poor science reporting results in a skewed view of the subject by the general public. This form of science reporting is based off the concept of headline grabbing rather than reporting the truth. Doing so is damaging towards the pursuit of science itself, almost belittiling the hard work of researchers. However, the condescending tone of the post and argument do little to help convince others of Dr. Meyers’s point. While regular readers of his blog most likely agree with his point and are aware of the media’s ineptitude, most others do not.

Regardless of his tone, Meyers brings up a number of important issues concerning science reporting. He brings up the point that the reporter of the original is “credulous” implying that he does not have any science training. In fact, the author of the article cited by the Discovery news article, Coco Masters, is not a trained scientist by any means, but rather a “media and communications specialist”. This begs the question of whether we should have scientifically trained journalists report about science and technology news. Would this help the quality of reporting? It would be reasonable to assume that this is not currently done because there is no awareness of how inaccurate and misrepresented science reporting is. If there is no demand for change, the media will not change their presentation of science reporting because the current system is profitable enough. This then raises the question of how awareness for this issue could be raised effectively to make change more favorable. Perhaps Dr. Meyers’s post is a good start, but the issue must be made more apparent to a broader audience.