At Birmingham University there is a man called Dr Kevin Warwick, and he has been a fountain of eye-catching stories for some time. He puts a chip from a wireless ID card in his arm, then shows journalists how he can open doors in his department using it. ‘I am a cyborg,’ he announces, ‘a melding of man and machine,’ and the media are duly impressed. A favourite research story from his lab – although it’s never been published in any kind of academic journal, of course – purported to show that watching Richard and Judy improves children’s IQ test performance much more effectively than all kinds of other things you might expect to do so, like, say, some exercise, or drinking some coffee.

This was not a peripheral funny: it was a news story, and unlike most genuine science stories, it produced an editorial leader in the Independent. I don’t have to scratch around to find more examples: there are five hundred to choose from, as I’ve said. ‘Infidelity is genetic,’ say scientists. ‘Electricity allergy real,’ says researcher. ‘In the future, all men will have big willies,’ says an evolutionary biologist from LSE.

These stories are empty, wacky filler, masquerading as science, and they reach their purest form in stories where scientists have ‘found’ the formula for something. How wacky those boffins are. Recently you may have enjoyed the perfect way to eat ice cream (A?Tp?Tm/Ft?At+V?LT?Sp?W/Tt=3d20), the perfect TV sitcom (C=3d [(R?D)+V]?F/A+S, according to the Telegraph), the perfect boiled egg (Daily Mail), the perfect joke (the Telegraph again), and the most depressing day of the year ([W+(D–d)]?TQ M?NA, in almost every newspaper in the world). I could go on.

These stories are invariably written up by science correspondents, and hotly followed – to universal approbation – by comment pieces from humanities graduates on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are, because from the bunker-like mentality of my ‘parody’ hypothesis, that is the appeal of these stories: they play on the public’s view of science as irrelevant, peripheral boffinry.

They are also there to make money, to promote products, and to fill pages cheaply, with a minimum of journalistic effort. Let’s take some of the most prominent examples. Dr Cliff Arnall is the king of the equation story, and his recent output includes the formulae for the most miserable day of the year, the happiest day of the year, the perfect long weekend and many, many more. According to the BBC he is ‘Professor Arnall’; usually he is ‘Dr Cliff Arnall of Cardiff University’. In reality he’s a private entrepreneur running confidence-building and stress- management courses, who has done a bit of part-time instructing at Cardiff University. The university’s press office, however, are keen to put him in their monthly media-monitoring success reports. This is how low we have sunk.

Perhaps you nurture fond hopes for these formulae – perhaps you think they make science ‘relevant’ and ‘fun’, a bit like Christian rock. But you should know that they come from PR companies, often fully-formed and ready to have a scientist’s name attached to them. In fact PR companies are very open to their customers about this practice: it is referred to as ‘advertising equivalent exposure’, whereby a ‘news’ story is put out which can be attached to a client’s name.

Cliff Arnall’s formula to identify the most miserable day of the year has now become an annual media stalwart. It was sponsored by Sky Travel, and appeared in January, the perfect time to book a holiday. His ‘happiest day of the year’ formula appears in June – it received yet another outing in the Telegraph and the Mail in 2008 – and was sponsored by Wall’s ice cream. Professor Cary Cooper’s formula to grade sporting triumphs was sponsored by Tesco. The equation for the beer-goggle effect, whereby ladies become more attractive after some ale, was produced by Dr Nathan Efron, Professor of Clinical Optometry at the University of Manchester, and sponsored by the optical products manufacturer Bausch & Lomb; the formula for the perfect penalty kick, by Dr David Lewis of Liverpool John Moores, was sponsored by Ladbrokes; the formula for the perfect way to pull a Christmas cracker, by Dr Paul Stevenson of the University of Surrey, was commissioned by Tesco; the formula for the perfect beach, by Dr Dimitrios Buhalis of the University of Surrey, sponsored by travel firm Opodo. These are people from proper universities, putting their names to advertising equivalent exposure for PR companies.

I know how Dr Arnall is paid, because when I wrote critically in the newspaper about his endless equations stories just before Christmas, he sent me this genuinely charming email:

Further to your mentioning my name in conjunction with ‘Walls’ I just received a cheque from them. Cheers and season’s greetings, Cliff Arnall.

It’s not a scandal: it’s just stupid. These stories are not informative. They are promotional activity masquerading as news. They play – rather cynically – on the fact that most news editors wouldn’t know a science story if it danced naked in front of them. They play on journalists being short of time but still needing to fill pages, as more words are written by fewer reporters. It is, in fact, a perfect example of what investigative journalist Nick Davies has described as Churnalism, the uncritical rehashing of press releases into content, and in some respects this is merely a microcosm of a much wider problem that generalises to all areas of journalism. Research conducted at Cardiff University in 2007 showed that 80 per cent of all broadsheet news stories were ‘wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry’.

It strikes me that you can read press releases on the internet, without paying for them in newsagents.

‘All men will have big willies’

For all that they are foolish PR slop, these stories can have phenomenal penetrance. Those willies can be found in the Sun’s headline for a story on a radical new ‘Evolution Report’ by Dr Oliver Curry, ‘evolution theorist’ from the Darwin@LSE research centre. The story is a classic of the genre.

By the year 3000, the average human will be 61?2ft tall, have coffee-coloured skin and live for 120 years, new research predicts. And the good news does not end there. Blokes will be chuffed to learn their willies will get bigger – and women’s boobs will become more pert.

This was presented as important ‘new research’ in almost every British newspaper. In fact it was just a fanciful essay from a political theorist at LSE. Did it hold water, even on its own terms?

No. Firstly, Dr Oliver Curry seems to think that geographical and social mobility are new things, and that they will produce uniformly coffee-coloured humans in 1,000 years. Oliver has perhaps not been to Brazil, where black Africans, white Europeans and Native Americans have been having children together for many centuries. The Brazilians have not gone coffee-coloured: in fact they still show a wide range of skin pigmentation, from black to tan. Studies of skin pigmentation (some specifically performed in Brazil) show that skin pigmentation seems not to be related to the extent of your African heritage, and suggest that colour may be coded for by a fairly small number of genes, and probably doesn’t blend and even out as Oliver suggests.

What about his other ideas? He theorised that ultimately, through extreme socioeconomic divisions in society, humans will divide into two species: one tall, thin symmetrical, clean, healthy, intelligent and creative; the other short, stocky, asymmetrical, grubby, unhealthy and not as bright. Much like the peace-loving Eloi and the cannibalistic Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

Evolutionary theory is probably one of the top three most important ideas of our time, and it seems a shame to get it wrong. This ridiculous set of claims was covered in every British newspaper as a news story, but none of them thought to mention that dividing into species, as Curry thinks we will do, usually requires some fairly strong pressures, like, say, geographical divisions. The Tasmanian Aboriginals, for example, who had been isolated for 10,000 years, were still able to have children with other humans from outside. ‘Sympatric speciation’, a division into species where the two groups live in the same place, divided only by socioeconomic factors, as Curry is proposing, is even tougher. For a while, many scientists didn’t think it happened at all. It would require that these divides were absolute, although history shows that attractive impoverished females and wealthy ugly men can be remarkably resourceful in love.

I could go on – the full press release is at badscience. net for your amusement. But the trivial problems in this trivial essay are not the issue: what’s odd is how it became a ‘boffins today said’ science story all over the media, with the BBC, the Telegraph, the Sun, the Scotsman, Metro and many more lapping it up without criticism.

How does this happen? By now you don’t need me to tell you that the ‘research’ – or ‘essay’ – was paid for by Bravo, a bikini-and-fast-car ‘men’s TV channel’ which was celebrating its twenty-first year in operation. (In the week of Dr Curry’s important science essay, just to give you a flavour of the channel, you could catch the movie

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