Why combining science and showmanship risks the future of research

Portions of science seem to be collapsing into the entertainment industry, raising serious questions about accuracy, funding and credibility

Imagine walking through a forest. You spy a wheelbarrow full of jumbled bones and teeth. After securing your selfie, who you gonna call? The Guardian? The Ghostbusters? The coroner? Just like Sherlock Holmes or CSI, all of those contacts would want answers to the same essential questions. To whom did these bones once belong? How long have they been here? How did they get here in the first place?

It is easy to make up stories to account for the facts, but science and science fiction are different things. What about your wheelbarrow? If the coroner, after careful comparison, concludes that these bones are not modern human, "paleoanthropologists" might take over the investigation. This is where the fun invariably begins. We practitioners of this small and peculiar specialty are far outnumbered by scientists studying fruit fly embryogenesis, but we register media punches far above our meagre collective weight. Nothing excites us like a new bunch of old bones. And the public loves stories about human origins almost as much as those about crime, pyramids, dinosaurs, extraterrestrials, and the Kardashians.