More on Ida: overblown claims and a worrying precedent

Now that the scientific details of Darwinius masillae are available for scrutiny by those who weren't given privileged advance access, some doubts are emerging. Not about the significance of the fossil per se -- it is a magnificent specimen and important -- but about the interpretation placed on it by the analysis team, and the hype that has surrounded the announcement.

There is a feeling out there that publication has been rushed, and that the data don't fully support the sweeping claims that are being made. As Henry Gee (@cromercrox), Nature's palaeontology editor, put it on Twitter:

When something has been dead for 47,000,000 years, you'd have thought that they'd have spent a little more time on it at this end.

The issue is explained well by the brilliant Laelaps: it is far from certain that the adapids, the group to which Ida belongs, are the ancestors of modern monkeys, apes and humans. The consensus view is that the adapids were an evolutionary dead end, and that anthropoids (monkeys etc) are the descendents of animals that looked more like modern tarsiers.

As outlined in the paper "Evolving Perspectives on Anthropoidea" (among others) included in the recent Anthropoid Origins volume, it presently appears that tarsiers and omomyids are the closest groups to anthropoids. This is based upon a combination of fossil, genetic, and morphological evidence. This makes the adapid primates, including Darwinius, a more distant side branch more closely related to living lemurs and lorises.

The team behind the Ida discovery are claiming that adapids like Darwinius are actually members of the haplorrhine group, which contains anthropoids like us and tarsiers. But as Laelaps says, their evidence for this is extremely limited:

By moving the adapids into the haplorrhine group they can then make the claim that anthropoids evolved from the adapid stem and not tarsiers or omomyids. The problem is that they are using just one genus, Darwinius, to change the placement of an entire group without using any cladistic analysis! This is not good science.

The bottom line is that the hypothesis that Darwinius is closer to anthropoids than tarsiers or omomyids does not have strong support. Even though the authors of the paper constructed a very simple cladogram they did not undertake a full, rigorous cladistic analysis to support their claims. I am baffled as to how they could stress the significance of this fossil without undertaking the requisite research to support their hypothesis.

In short, while Ida is an important fossil, she isn't all that. The authors haven't presented enough evidence to support their claims.

This would be an issue even if this discovery had been announced in the normal way. But it's especially serious given the publicity blitz behind Ida. As I blogged yesterday, a popular book, a documentary, a website and an exhibition have been launched on the back of this find, before it has received full scientific scrutiny. The interpretation of Jorn Hurum and his team may well be wrong. But their story is all that most people are going to hear.

You have to wonder, as did Karen James in a comment on my post yesterday, whether this research was deliberately rushed, and submitted to a journal (PLoS ONE) with a less rigorous pre-publication review system than Nature or Science, to fit with the media schedule. And why did the journal agree to go along with this?

I'm also concerned that a worrying precedent has been set here. PLoS ONE, like most journals, normally release their papers to journalists under embargo, to give them good time to prepare a story and consult independent experts. That didn't happen this time: I was shown a copy by the production company working with the scientists yesterday morning, but I wasn't allowed to take it away from their offices. Many other reporters didn't even have that luxury, seeing the paper only when it went live on the PLoS website at 3.30pm.

For media outlets that had bought the rights, such as the BBC, it was a different story -- full access, weeks or even months in advance. Is it really right that full embargoed access to important and controversial research findings should be restricted on the say-so of the authors, to media that best suit their publicity strategy? Especially when money has changed hands?

MH

An end-note: there was an unfortunate error in the graphic accompanying my piece in the paper. An early draft was printed by mistake. Darwinius masillae is not a direct ancestor of both lemurs/lorises and apes/monkeys. It seems to lie on the ape/monkey branch, after the last common ancestor of both groups, and it may well be a direct ancestor of nothing at all that exists today. It's being corrected online.

Comments

[Michael]

This is what I call, the end justifies the means...

"When asked if the publicity surrounding the fossil was overdone (the History Channel touts the discovery as “the most important find in 47 million years”), Hurum said he didn’t think so.

“That’s part of getting science out to the public to get attention,” he said. “I don’t think that’s so wrong.”

The hype was about ratings, public attention, and trying to gain fame off of very little so-called evidence with an explosion of bias interpretation.

[Ann]

He says it on Twitter ... well, that says it all, really. Pathetic.

[JULES]

So Ida is a direct ancestor of nothing at all that exists today! Very probably a direct ancestor of nothing at all that has ever existed. If she is a direct ancestor of nothing at all in the past or present then she is not a link of any kind, between mankind or any other kind. Evidence not of evolution but of yet another creature that once lived in our amazing world.