The Ida Missing Link story, whch is creating a certain media excitement at the moment, is an evolutionary fable of a different kind for the television industry. Driven by Darwinian competition, television companies have evolved a bizarre hybrid in which documentary networks pump resources into scientific research, which are arranged as sparkly stories. These in turn entice an audience rather like some species of bird decorating its nest to attract a mate. All that matters is the display, which has evolved past its original function, so the science is present only as a kind of vestigial organ.

On Wednesday, we ran a piece on Screen Hub about the controversy, which I will integrate with some later information. Next Monday night in the US, Discovery Channel will broadcast the whole two hour awe-fest, and the response will show us whether the rumblings about intellectual integrity damage the product. I am not holding my breath, but I am hoping that the world-wide science filmmaking gang might decide this is an evolutionary dead end, to live out its solitary life in some enclosure behind a sign which says “Don’t Go Here Again!”.

Here is the article:

World’s Biggest Documentary Presale: Monkeying around with the origin of Man

Fossil of ancient primate turned into intricate media circus, all to rebrand a bank. Where did the History Channel get the evidence? They bought it.

A&E, which runs the History Channel, has built a huge media event around a research program into a fossilised primate bought commercially in Germany, and has ensured that the science has been carried out in secret. As the scientists developed their research paper, the film was known only as “Project Y”, and is still not on the producer’s website.

Alongside this work, we can picture an equally hidden skunkworks of publicists, in whose imaginative hands the two hour special to be released in the US next Monday, ballyhooed first at a huge press conference last Monday, was pumped up with adjectives worthy of a new Einstein.

This has caused both consternation and derision across the scientific community and its serious journalists, because of the nature of the claimed discovery.

Nearly fifty million years ago, primates were beginning their long evolutionary journey to become an intricate collection of species and subfamilies. They had split into two groups, which subdivided into two more, one of which led to humans. Unfortunately, to steal some technicalities from the scientific blogosphere, the fossil is placed in a complicated and not always decorous shit-fight about vitamin C production, wet noses, tooth combs and toilet claws which place this single individual in relation to the human lineage.

As it stands, it is impossible to determine with any certainty whether this fossil is part of our heritage or not. It could very well be a separate branch, whose descendent species have been completely obliterated, and contribute nothing to the modern biosphere.

Nonetheless, the skunkworks has given this ambiguous creature a name – Ida. The program in the US is called The Link. In the UK, it will be Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor. This hour-long version will be dignified by a script and narration track from Sir David Attenborough. BBC Worldwide will sell it to broadcasters who deal with the likes of us.

The website, which will be much spiffier once the film is launched, carries a to camera video from Attenborough. More sardonic viewers than I might call it a bizarre equivocating rant, which contains the phrase, “I don’t know”, while the Great Science Communicator talks only about the possible response of the scientists, rather than the factual content.

The skunkworks has gone into a frenzy overr this single program. This Will Change Everything is the publicity line.

“Huh?”, says the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, which boggles with fine restraint over the media’s attitude to truthiness in science. A missing link? But on the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth, the line is too good to resist. Scientists might curl their lips, but an audience of millions might tune in.

This is the kind of hype being deployed, from an emailed press release to a cynical American scientist:

“WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING

Ground-Breaking Global Announcement

What: An international press conference to unveil a major historic scientific find. After two years of research a team of world-renowned scientists will announce their findings, which address a long-standing scientific puzzle.

The find is lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times. History brings this momentous find to America and will follow with the premiere of a major television special on Monday, May 25 at 9 pm ET/PT chronicling the discovery and investigation.

Who: Mayor Michael Bloomberg; International team of scientists who researched the find; Abbe Raven, President and CEO, A&E Television Networks; Nancy Dubuc, Executive Vice President and General Manager, History; Ellen Futter, President, American Museum of Natural History.

In other publicity, the History Channel says this discovery is up there with the moon landing and the Kennedy assassination.

The Guardian claimed the press conference was touching, since Ida was actually revealed inside a glass box (for all the world like an alien pilot recovered from a spacecraft). The audience could see bones, and evidence of fur and the leaves and fruit in her last meal. But, surrounded by the “desperate, unseemly scramble to gather some of the action”,

“Dr Jorn Hurum, the scientist at the heart of the project, made the most exotic parallels. He screened photographs of the Mona Lisa and the Rosetta Stone, without elucidation, though the implication was clear. He variously described the fossil as the Holy Grail of paleontology and the lost ark of archeology.”

The New York Times provides an engaging description of the History Channel’s machinations. The project began when Oslo paleontologist Jorn H Hurum bought the fossil which had already been in a collector’s drawer for around 25 years, assembled a team, and accidentally met Anthony Geffen, who runs Atlantic Productions, which was also finishing Predator X at the same time. (Hurum worked on that project as well.)

The two made a deal, which ultimately lead to this perfect storm of adjectives. The NYT harvested this wonderful line from Hurum to describe his logic:

“Any pop band is doing the same thing… Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to start thinking the same way in science.”

That is refreshing, since most scientists treat popularisation like the plague and have to be dragged stiff legged and polysyllabically entangled to the camera. But this story also looks like exactly what they are frightened of.

Hurum has maintained an icy Scandinavian discipline in the publicity process. We have no idea how he felt as his own funky Nordic project somehow moved to Michigan, and was publicised with the aid of the Mayor of New York. But he surely felt like a rock star as he stood before that image of the Mona Lisa, surrounded by eager politicians.

This week, the skunkworks cone of silence was lifted from the project, and we can see some intriguing details in the mess, which also point to some conundrums in the publicity system.

We now have a key document, which had to be released to ensure the scientific credibility of the project. PLoSone, the peer-reviewed but public access journal, has published the legitimate research paper which reports the findings, and the background to the story. It is available online, for anyone to read. In first writing this story, I couldn’t find it, and it turns out to have been closely embargoed until the press conference. The television tail wagged the paper pooch a lot here, and Chris Mooney has an excellent post dissecting the grubbiness. Among other details, it allows us to deduce how the skunkworks gamed with the minds and ambitions of the PloS people, who seemed to have wanted the paper enough to take some collateral damage to their reputation.

Obviously the Discovery Skunkworks was assembling all the pieces to create a cut-through event. And we can imagine the network programmers chewing the carpet as the entire production process moves towards the broadcast date like a heat seeking missile while the scientists futzed around with the paper, and tried to find a home for it in an arcane area of publishing which takes its own sweet time to act, thank you very much. If you start from the premiss that happy adverstisers on the Discovery Channel are much more important than scientific integrity, the whole manoever makes perfect sense.

I am betting that the marketing skunkworks wanted to stay on message with some simple ideas. Think link! Skeleton from Oslo! New, new discoveries! In that mindset, complexity was invented by Satan.

In fact, this is wonderful material without the messianic oversimplifications. The fossil is the oldest complete primate discovered, and it shows anatomical subtleties around soft tissues. Because the bones have been slightly crushed, they can only be observed remotely, so the full battery of modern beeping machines and screens are deployed to analyse it. With this alone, the work is pretty wonderful.

There is also a genuine scientific dispute about the deductions from the paleobiology – challenging to communicate, but there is plenty of visual material.

However, I guess that the skunkworks also wanted to keep some secrets about the narrative behind the discovery of the fossil. That is the only way I can explain why they would hide a lovely, ironic and vaguely ridiculous story which is fully acknowledged in the paper.

Forty eight million years ago, the Messel Pit in Germany was on the edge of a volcanic lake, surrounded by paratropical rain forest, which periodically burped up poisonous gases and killed the animals. By 1983, it was a shale pit, yielding a remarkable collection of fossils. Unfortunately, the owners wanted to turn it into a garbage dump, so the shale had to be split hurriedly, and the fossils carted away with little scientific ceremony.

We now know more about that private collector and the sale, via The Guardian on Friday. Probably a dentist, s/he lived on the outskirts of Frankfurt, and kept it framed on the wall.

“The remarkable specimen came to light only after the collector enlisted the help of a private dealer, Thomas Perner. He brokered a $1m (£629,000) deal for the 47m-year-old primate with a paleontologist from Oslo’s Natural History Museum in a vodka bar in Hamburg. The identity of the collector remains a well-guarded secret.”

However, the PloS paper told us that the specimen had actually been split in half, which I think refers to the mirror pieces created when the encasing shale is broken open . One half – most of which was the indented side of the fossil, had been sold to a Natural History Museum in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Someone, and the paper is discreet about who, then added other bits and pieces to create the appearance of a complete skeleton, thereby creating a false specimen. This was analysed by the lead author of the current study, Jens L. Franzen from Frankfurt, who published a paper in 2000 which sorted out most of the confusion, and provided the first tranche of analysis. This had taken at least six years.

In 2007, when the University of Oslo bought the rest of the specimen, the two pieces could be re-united. The paper does not describe how this happened, or whether the Oslo people knew what they had bought immediately.

According to Wikipedia,

“The significance of the fossil was first recognized by vertebrate palaeontologist Hurum, who was shown photographs of the specimen through a chance encounter at the Hamburg Fossil and Mineral Fair in 2006. He was approached by a dealer, offering the fossil for $1 million.[16] Dr. Hurum sought to find a natural history museum able to pay for the specimen, and eventually secured funds from the Natural History Museum of Oslo.”

Rebuilding the specimen enabled the combined team to toss out the last bits of fakery, and then do some taxonomy to reassign the animal to another lineage. ((As an Adapoidea, whose ending gets us close to the name Ida, though Hurum claims it is named after his daughter.)

Is that not a great story? The paper also reveals that the funding for Gingerich’s research came from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which had “no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

Did the BBC, the History Channel, ZDF and NRK, who funded the documentary, pay for the non-Gingerich research? The Mayor of New York, “Abbe Raven, President and CEO, A&E Television Networks; Nancy Dubuc, Executive Vice President and General Manager, History; Ellen Futter, President, American Museum of Natural History” certainly wanted to claim a lot of the credit, by decorating that press conference with their presence.

The documentary may well have financed most of the project. Discovery has moved in that direction, and National Geographic has done this since the magazine first started.

Even if the funding was not direct, I guess a fair amount of cash changed hands to secure the rights to this project, and the general co-operation of the scientists. I would guess that they were able to travel, and secure time on sexy visualisation gear too, while sending the bill to the production company.

The producers, and their marketing teams, certainly did influence the timing, the secrecy and the use of the open-access system to lodge the paper. And they did use the scientists as the face of some very large claims.

Are they happy with their bargain? That we don’t know, and my imaginary skunkworks would not want the rest of us to find out.

The science bloggers are fascinating on the topic. Carl Zimmer at The Loom puts the boot in with the ease of a lizard whacking a fly. Framing Science is thoughtful on the whole process of popularisation; Laelaps does the science of this well, though the comments reveal just how little the scientists understand the documentary process, and the major event hype machine.

If you take money from a cable channel to support the work of your Institute, you must expect the owners to try and recover the millions it costs them to deliver the program to the audience. They will maximise the size of that audience for the benefit of advertisers and subscribers. Is it churlish to call this Capitalism for Dummies?

The story did leak out early, in the way which turns publicists into ravening hate machines on the telephone. Philip Gingerich, president-elect of the Paleontological Society in the U.S., a co-writer of the paper from the research, spoke to a Wall Street Journal reporter. While the cannier Norwegian, Hurum, kept his mouth shut, the unfortunate Gingerich only told Gautam Naik that the story was embargoed at the end of the interview. The reporter wrote a reasonable account, which is a scoop in that strange space where a breaking story is related not to events but to the iron mantle of secrecy by which the news is “managed”.

Gingerich seems to have been a real nightmare – he also spoke to the Daily Mail in London. Via the Wall Street Journal, The Australian and Mooney, we have a line from Gingerich which is pretty damaging:

“There was a TV company involved and time pressure. We’ve been pushed to finish the study. It’s not how I like to do science”.

It seems to me this situation is a humiliating mess, and Gingerich’s behaviour suggests a certain pain on the part of scientists who may feel like performing monkeys. This tale does point to the difficulties of science television. How can filmmakers deliver a sexy film, and retain the finesse on which scientists build their self-respect?

Was it “the world’s biggest television documentary presale” as I claimed in the headline? I don’t know, but it got your attention.

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The Knight Science Journalism Tracker, based at MIT, is a great service, if you are interested either in science, or the interface between science and the media.

Primates, by the way, have probably been around in some form for at least eighty million years. Lose yourself in the complexities on Wikipedia.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 9:03 pm and is filed under science, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.