Columbia Journalism Review officially shark-jumps on #IFLS

First, CJR senior writer Alexis Sobel Fitts writes a five-webpage cover story about "I Fucking Love Science" and its founder, Elise Andrew.

In doing so, she commits these cardinal errors:
1. Writing the story about herself as much as Andrew.
2. Ignoring Andrew's seeming very deliberate violation of not just journalistic ethics, but ethics in general through not honoring copyright of NUMEROUS science-related photos, including a number by Google+ friend of mine Alex Wild.
3. Not talking to anybody who could and would have told her about this. (Wild is among those commenting on the page.)

In other words, it's shoddy journalism for being:
1. Self-centered
2. Lazy
3. One-sided

And, other trade publications and blogs are weighing in, too. Here's Knight Science Journalism Tracker:

For starters, the profile appeared in a journalistic publication, written in an unjournalistic way, about a person whose work is not journalism. Go ahead and debate what that J-word actually means in the comments, but I’d argue that several of the fundamental tenets of journalism – such as accuracy and unbiased reporting – are missing from the CJR piece (which also happens to be this issue’s cover story).

 Instead of taking a measured, balanced look at the person behind a media phenomenon, the profile came off as an overly sunny PR puff piece. After all, Andrew is not journalism’s first self-made brand. And, oh, by the way, the profile mentions almost as an aside, there is a history of copyright infringement and plagiarism accusations being directed at IFLS.

That's about right. 

Meanwhile, doesn't CJR have a managing editor? Who let this crap be printed? Let alone, who decided this was the magazine version's cover story?

Well, these people let this crap be published:

Editor in Chief & Publisher
Elizabeth Spayd

Deputy Editor in Chief
Brent Cunningham

Associate Editor/Production Editor
Christie Chisholm

Associate Editor Kira Goldenberg

Click here to email them. Or here to suggest this, their own piece as a "dart" under the mag's "Darts and Laurels."

Worse, who made the decision to let Fitts double down on her indefensible writing with a follow-up that's even worse in some ways?

As for the claims that Andrew's not gotten any "boosts" or "helps," one of Fitts' new, additional claims? Uhh, wrong!

From a March announcement by former national late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson:

Science Channel greenlit new series “I F-ing Love Science,” executive produced by CBS’ “Late Late Show” host Craig Ferguson. Ferguson made the announcement via a videotaped message at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas on Saturday.

So, please, that's not even close to being true.

Just stop it.

Fitts is doubling down on being:

1. Self-centered
2. Lazy (couldn't do a teh Google for the Ferguson bit?)
3. One-sided

Hence my comment on the follow-up piece:

I'm a journalist who didn't study journalism in college, and I didn't train inside one of "legacy media's great institutions," but I still know ethics, including of attribution. So, Alexis, does Ms. Andrew deserve a "free pass" on ethics? Copyright issues apply across all streams of journalism, and communications beyond journalism, including public relations, non-journalistic book writing and more.

And, if Fitts likes the snarkiness of "new journalism," I added:

Can I copy your mugshot for for-profit use without attribution? How much of your original piece can I copy without attribution? 

So, in addition to that comment, I asked CJR on those pages to fire Fitts. 

Oh, and you can consider firing David Uberti, too, or whoever above his head had the idea of now tripling down on the craptacular and putting both Fitts original story and her "apologia" follow-up under this week's must-reads of the week.

#Cosmosfail, part 2

Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton, fit for Saturday morning
and kiddie cartoons. / Fox via Mother  Jones.

"Imagine" ... a TV show that gives you a full five minutes of dialogue before running more commercials! But doesn't have more money for either better animation or live actors to recreate ancient science. Maybe Ken Burns will do HIS version of Cosmos some day.

I hadn't planned on doing another blog post about Cosmos after my post-opening night one. But, after getting teased by a second episode that was seemingly better overall, per that paragraph above, about the Isaac Newton episode.

Besides, if you were able to do, and you had money for, the CGI dinosaur in the first episode, couldn't you do a CGI Newton and Halley rather than the Saturday morning cartoons?

Next complaint? The kid looking at the sky for comets at the end of the main Newton segment.

Oh, lordy, is that a paid product placement for Google Glass? That little clip was totally unnecessary in general.

As for Halley? People who know why the comet is named after him know he didn't discover a comet. A bit of a straw man there, though it was nice to see him otherwise get his due. That said, I know that the people is invented for people, especially children, with less science knowledge.

But, if you're going to give people their due, why not mention Leibniz's independent invention of calculus at the same time as Newton? For that matter, why not take a 2-minute digression to go from science to math to talk about how calculus, as much as Newton's laws of gravitation, were the start of modern science?

Oh, I forgot. It's been five minutes and we have to run another commercial. No time for calculus!

Nor did we have time to spend more time on Kepler as the world's first science fiction writer, which would have been another great sidebar.

Or to actually get past Cosmos' myth about "evil Robert Hooke" stifling "saintly Isaac Newton" and look more at reality and learn about Hooke. And, since Newton made the "standing on the shoulders of giants" quote, elevating him to a science rock star has extra irony. On the other hand, Newton's famous quote, per this io9 piece, may have been an early modern era example of heavy sarcasm.

And, if we want to talk about "major league asshole," per W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Newton was just as much of one to Leibniz on calculus as Hooke was to Newton on gravity, if not more so.

As for the final section of this week's episode, I don't think all astrophysicists are sanguine that life on a planet in one of two colliding galaxies would be in no danger.  After all, just a small gravitational tweak could produce an orbital change of note. I mean, if Earth were just 10 percent closer to, or further away, from the Sun than it is, or its orbit were just 10 percent more elliptical than it is, the history of life here would be far different than it actually is.

Maybe it's not so much the cartoons (though I still find them cheesy) as the cartoons versus CGI represent a diversity in styles. Or even a mish-mash. Or even a clash.

I'm thinking that it's also an audience focus issue behind that. A number of people have said how they like that this one seems pitched even to kids at times. While Sagan wasn't trying to talk over anybody's heads, he seemed to have a more consistent focus as far as target audience.

That said, some of the CGI is better and some is worse. The comet brightening from this episode was cheesy within the CGI. And, it's not like we couldn't, instead, start from stills of actual comets, whether Halley's or Ison, or use clips transmitted from the Rosetta or Deep Space satellites.

But, Tyson wants the graphics, to pull at heartstrings.

I guess this can now extend to a gripe about the CGI dinosaur. In the original episode, I questioned why Tyson didn't go filming something in the actual Burgess Shale, or find clips of a field crew at work there. Ditto on planetary astronomy. I want actual pics and video, not graphics, whether CGI or cartoons. What's the point in talking about science if you're not showing the actual science?

The sad fall of Bora Zivkovic

Science geeks know Zivkovic as the head of blogging at Scientific American, as well as being a good sciencce bloger there, and in previous stops, himself. Many know him as the "blogfather," a term of endearment, or more, that he apparently encouraged.

So, too, did many of his charges as young bloggers. Young bloggers who apparently forgot that he was also their boss, and who maybe didn't stop to consider that a "term of endearment" can also be a tool of manipulation. After all, he supposedly is charming, and tries to give that impression on his blog's about page.

And that leads us to the stunning (but not quite shocking) story of problems of the now-former SciAm blogging chief. As in "sexual harassment" problems. Problems alleged my multiple women, which has led to his resigning as the "blogfather."

Several issues here. 

First, though the drinking smartly didn't go too far, in a couple of instances, alcohol at least lowered inhibitions. Per what I blogged about on this issue earlier this week, fortunately, the women in this case recognized the potential peril before getting too much in their cups. (Per that link, and other things, there's a sidebar or two near the bottom of this post.)

Second, on his Twitter feed, Bora says ... he's learning. How much slack do we cut him for being from pre-implosion Yugoslavia? While noting that he's spent the great majority of his adult life in the U.S.?

Not a lot, I'd say. In fact, due to things like him allegedly using the "sexual problems at home" line as a play for sexual sympathy, the "I'm learning," while possibly genuine, possibly is not. I just don't know. Especially if we don't know what he's learning. What he thinks he should learn. Etc.

Third. Bora is a good science writer. I hope he gets a new position. He could be a good mentor of younger science writers. But, I don't know that. As one of his accusers noted, in essence: Did Bora take young women science writers under his wing because he saw their potential, or was he "grooming"?

Fourth, I'm not totally disinterested in at least tangential issues related to this. I think Bora is a good science writer, and a good scientist. As a journalist overall? He buys too blankly into claims of Gnu Media gurus about how traditional journalism is dead without doing his own critical thought. I know that's in part because of where his financial bread is buttered, even though SciAm's ultimate parent owner is one of the largest "old media" companies in the world. But still.

And, while the journalistic ethics problem was at Scientific American the magazine, and not his online blogging stable, he doesn't recognize journalistic ethics problems when they arise. Re teh publication as a whole, there's been journalistic ethics with  an advertorial special section not labeled as such, with him not seeing that as a problem, Or here, a lack of critical thinking on claiming agriculture was invented for beer, and also use of wrong data. (These things go back to my previous paragraph; SciAm as well as Discover seem to be getting more and more social media focused.) I've not seen this spill over into what passes by his blogging radar screen yet, but...

I hope that whatever writing world is in his future, he's "learning" in this area, too.

And, per what else I said, let's hope young female science bloggers, without getting cynical, learn to be more skeptical as needed.

Finally, as promised, sidebars.

Allegedly, that's Atheism Plus darling Rebecca Watson
at left. (Link of photo implies no consent to all content.)

First sidebar. Bora, on his own Facebook timeline, recently had a picture of him with notorious Atheism Pluser/nth-wave feminist or something Rebecca Watson. (It's my blog, and I get to say "notorious" instead of "relatively well known" or anything else.) Given that, per what I mentioned above about a blog post of mine, a blog post on women being careful about drinking situations, and other things, like allegations of Bora's hug-friendliness, this picture has massive new irony levels.

(Since Bora's FB feed is not set to "public," even though I downloaded the pic, I can't post it here, as I describe in another blog post of mine about my stance on online privacy issues. So far, a brief Google Images search hasn't turned it up on a public venue.) 

Anyway, back to the irony of said picture, which was at a public "con" of some sort, one of the movement skepticism conferences or something.

That includes the fact that Watson herself has been accused of Sarah Palin-type winks, of having her own problems with drinking and intimate behavior, per the photo, and more. (There's another graphic, a screen capture of Watson's comments over the years about drinking and manipulativeness, at the blog link. And more on Gnu Atheism and the Atheism Plus submovement within it's issues on drinking and manipulativeness here.

That leads to sidebar two. And here, it's even clearer there are other dynamics at play among the nth-wave feminist crowd et al. Zvan rightfully notes, in the motorboat wake of this, that harassment can be done by women, too (I'm shocked to hear that out of her mouth) but, then goes on to do what is arguably "slut shaming." She'd surely call it that if someone else did it. It's also possibly a form of online bullying to keep non nth-ers in line. 

And, that leads to another "sad" observation. What Bora did was sad. What certain people are doing to "appropriate" that issue is at least equally sad.

To sum up:
1. I want more women science writers;
2. I want sexual harassment, manipulation, etc. of women to stop;
3. I want women to accept responsibility for what they can do in the way of "harm reduction" or whatever;
4. I want Bora to learn from this, to help No. 1, to help fight No. 2, and also, to become a better science blogger in terms of promoting better science content;
5. And, I want nth-wave feminists to stop acting like they have the final word on these issues. 

I also want Bora's replacement at SciAm to become a better promoter of better science content. A good one-third of blogging there in the past year or two has seemed like little more than social media oriented clickbait.

Asymmetry and handedness ... not correlated, IMO

However, that is a possible opinion of Live Science, which suggests human preference for right-handedness may be related to bilateral asymmetry of internal organs.

Really? I believe our primate kin, who split 50-50 on preference for one particular hand over the other, are also bilaterally asymmetrical.

Beyond that, as many researchers try to relate human handedness asymmetry to brain function hemispheric asymmetry, we don't know whether the chicken or egg came first there.

You know, Live Science seems to spit out about one clunker a week.

Does Scientific American have a ScienceBlogs problem?

Updated at bottom with addition information that, in my opinion, makes Scientific American look even worse.

A few months back, ScienceBlogs was in full revolt over Pepsi being asked, by SciBlogs' top brass, to sponsor a health blog. Well, what's up with SciAm having Chevy Volt sponsor a special section on electric cars?

Add in the fact that the stories linked off the online cover page of the special section are a mix of SciAm-reported stories and Chevy PR, and it really doesn't look good.

Also, not good? SciAm's stories all talk about "electric cars" when the Chevy Volt isn't. It's a hybrid, and Chevy has finally admitted that. In short, it's bad PR, bad journalism, and if we're counting tech as science, bad science, too.

And, no, it's not the deal that this was "sneaky" like the Pepsi/SciBlogs deal. Sorry, @BoraZ. (That said, depending on who in Scientific American's editorial hierarchy knew about this, and who didn't, and when, it may well be sneaky, for all I know.)

That wasn't the only thing wrong with the Pepsi issue at ScienceBlogs, although it was the first problem and the first-visible one. There was also the question about Pepsi, rather than, say, FiberOne, sponsoring a health-related blog.

So, in line with that, if Scientific American was going to sell itself out for sponsorship from an electric car, then why didn't it get an actual electric car, i.e., the Nissan Leaf, and not the Chevy Volt, which is a hybrid? Right there is an indication of how the "sponsorship" has affected the reporting.

Since the Volt isn't a pure electric ... I'd have to say this is a version of greenwash. It also, besides ethics, makes me wonder just how intelligent about auto tech some SciAm editors are.

I hadn't originally intended to name Bora, former ScienceBlogs blogger of "A Blog around the Clock" and now at Scientific American. BUT ... he just either doesn't get it, or is being defensive about Scientific American. An exchange of several Twitters over more than 24 hours leads me to believe that while it may be primarily the former, it could well be in part the latter.

If it is, Bora, you need to talk to other people at Scientific American rather than being defensive.

After all, you left SciBlogs in part over the Pepsi fiasco. I quote from your post about your leaving:

What is relevant is that a corporation paid to have a seat at the table with us. And that Seed made that happen.

What is relevant is that this event severely undermined the reputation of all of us. Who can trust anything we say in the future?

Even if you already know me and trust me, can people arriving here by random searches trust me? Once they look around the site and see that Pepsi has a blog here, why would they believe I am not exactly the same, some kind of shill for some kind of industry?

At the end, you said Seed's image is permanently damaged.

Well didn't Volt, in this case, also pay "to have a seat at the table"? Doesn't that affect SciAm's reputation?

Answers? Yes and yes.

Update, Dec. 28:/ Apparently, I've gotten a bit under Bora's skin, as he thinks I am just pot stirring. In his last Tweet on the subject though, he adds one more point that makes SciAm look even worse, in my book.
He notes that the special project from August! I usually don't read the mag stem-to-stern online or off, but for it to be still promoted 4 months later? And, after GM brass officially admitted the Volt is a hybrid, to STILL, with the side-by-side presentation and the content of the articles, to STILL leave standing the implication that SciAm believes the Volt is an electric car, not a hybrid, AND that Volt could buy such favorable coverage in general.

Also, Bora, this is NOT about "investigative journalism." I know, because, I've actually DONE investigative journalism.

And, do you really think knowing the difference between a hybrid-drive vehicle and a truly electric is "too geeky" for Scientific American?

Wowsa.

Methinks thee doth indeed protest too much. Talk to the hand, Bora, on this one. Better yet? Seriously? Talk to some Scientific American editorial management, as I said when I first wrote this post, before updating it.

And, if this is pot stirring, I take that as a compliment.

AND, per the "lifting up" of new media? Or new-type media venues? The medium is NOT the message, contra McLuhan. New media faces the same ethical responsibilities and issues as old media.

In this case, in fact, since this is an easy issue to address, even solve, online, it's arguably worse than in the pre-Internet age. If I'm going to be in for a pot-stirring penny, I'm in for a pot-stirring pound. My forthrightness in not swooning over new media is probably why Jay Rosens and others don't like what I say on the subject either.

UPdate, Oct. 3, 2011:  The Leaf is beating the sales pants off the Volt.

Oxytocin, MSM science reporting, scientist fluffery

Oxytocin is a two-edged sword; it can increase distrust as well as trust or love; further confirmation of that here. Once again, the claim that it's the "love hormone" is in part the fault of MSM science reporters, but it's also the fault of scientists playing up preliminary or partial research findings too much.

Read the story for just how varied oxytocin's effects actually are. That said, the research that showed it increased mistrust in some cases had a small sample size, so there may be some self-referential irony to both the story and this blog post.

Yet, two years AFTER that first piece, we have Paul Zak writing a book calling oxy the "love molecule." Even worse, he now calls it "the moral molecule."

Wikipedia is NOT Faux News

In blogging earlier today about NASA’s breathless hyping of its arsenic-using bacterium, I cited this Wikipedia page as a source for the fact that other arsenic presences in “organic” compounds was already known. And, when I dropped this link on a couple of different ScienceBlog sites, like Greg Laden’s, people went ape-shit.

Folks, as the header says, Wikipedia is NOT Faux News.

As I said rhetorically to those people, I now say in general, re the specific NASA post:

For readers who criticize Wikipedia, before the NASA story broke, the three footnotes on the arsenic section prior came from the University of Minnesota, NIH, and New Scientist. Got problems with all of them, too? The first two footnotes for the page as a whole were to National Academy of Sciences publications. Beyond that, Pharyngula, in his post about the NASA story, also has information on how arsenic in organic compounds is nothing new.

So, let’s get over the false skepticism about Wikipedia.

Now, in cases of history, biography or political science involving living persons or ongoing events, Wikipedia has a well-earned reputation for needing a skeptical look, though it’s getting better with new controls installed earlier this year.

Natural sciences? Different story. I challenge readers to show me a Wikipedia post in the natural sciences that’s contains monkey-wrenched information. Is it college-level textbook quality? Maybe not, but maybe so. It depends on the individual page. It’s usually at least as good as a high-school science textbook.

And, Wikipedia normally does NOT succumb to wingnuts. Its article on vaccine conspiracy, for example, has no room for antivaxxers' claims getting scientific or medical acceptance. Ditto its article on thimerosal controversy.

In brief, random reading, Wikiepedia's cold fusion article was the only one I saw that even halfway approached giving credence to non-mainstream science.

And, on the plus side, Wiki even has an article (more a list of links to individual articles) about topics generally considered as pseudoscience.

For people who think they're being skeptical by dismissing all of Wikipedia, or at least all science articles, they're not.

Here's an analogy. Just because Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt gives every appearance of being a warmonger on anything associated with Iraq or Afghanistan, and otherwise willing to accept uncritically anything voiced by a presidential administration as long as it doesn't go left of center, do I dismiss every Post editorial, let alone every Post op-ed columnist? Of course not.

Anyway, back to the NASA story vs. Wikipedia. I still say NASA's motives behind fluffery of this story is what needs scrutiny more than a Wikipedia science page.

Beyond fluffery, there appears to have been a lot of rushing this story to print, which, ironically, has a direct connection to cold fusion. There, the University of Utah pushed Pons and Fleischmann forward on a fast track so that it could establish priority on some patents.

Celebrating Darwin - erroneous poll language

Doing the exact thing I excoriated in my newspaper column this week, Gallup asked Americans if they "believe in" evolution. One no more "believes in" the theory of evolution than in the theory of gravity. One "accepts" (or "rejects") scientific theories.

Anyway, the Gallup results? At least a bit of good news for the use of reason, perhaps. There's a 14-point percentage gap to the good of "believers" vs. "nonbelievers."

Of course, the huge amount of "agnostics" on the issue indicate many Americans DO treat this as a matter of "belief" and not "acceptance."

Obama and McCain differ on several science issues

McCain IS McSame on NASA/manned flight; ScienceDebate asks a couple of iffy questions

ScienceDebate2008 has does a great fairly good job of comparing their stances on 14 science-related questions. After reading through the questions more, one question seemed just wrong to me, and second one not much better. More on that below.

One thing that John McCain flat gets wrong is manned space flight:
• It’s unnecessary.
• It could be dangerous, even lethal, viz a viz cosmic rays, to engage in it as far away as Mars.
• We can’t afford it.

And now, the two iffy questions.

National security:
• I feel uneasy about this question even being here.
Yes, our national security has become more and more technological. But, as a good left-liberal, this almost seems to me to be asking:
“And, how would YOU expand the military-industrial complex”?

Pandemics and biosecurity:
• I feel uneasy about this question even being here, at least as phrased, on similar grounds to the one above. Throwing in the “biosecurity” element seems to give more weight to the so-called Global War on Terror. That said, Obama actually went into that part of this issue before McCain did.

On to the other topics, though.

Nuclear:
• Both favor it, but only Obama adds the all important caveats about safe nuclear power that addresses nuclear waste, etc.

Driving:
McCain actually gets a point here, for talking about needing tougher penalties on carmakers who miss CAFE standard benchmarks.

Climate change:
• Similar in what they claim they will do. Obama aims to get 80 percent below 1990 emissions by 2050, while McCain aims for “just” 60 percent.
How realistic either one is, especially with the paucity of specific actions they plan, or details on cap-and-trade carbon plans as far as what baseline standards will be, is another issue altogether.

Energy:
• Obama talks about greener/more efficient building standards.

Education:
• As I said in a longer post specifically dedicated to this issue earlier today, both candidates hugely miss the boat by not pushing for a 200-day school year.

Genetics:
• Obama goes into more detail, and sounds more knowledgeable.

Stem-cell research:
• This is a clear McCain pander to the Religious Right, and, after the nomination of Sarah Palin, what did you expect? Basically, without calling it the “Bush policy,” he supports the Bush policy.

Oceans:
• Obama a winner for stressing we need to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention.

Water:
• Both are shamefully skimpy, and neither connects future water issues to global warming and climate change.

Space:
• McCain writes three times longer, without necessarily saying a lot more.

Government science integrity:
• Obama goes into more specifics about finding scientists of integrity for top White House and agency positions. He also promises the nation’s first chief technology officer.

Research funding priorities:
• McCain basically dodges the issue; Obama commits to life sciences.

Health:
• Both talk, necessarily, about health care costs. Obama’s plan is and will be better than anything of McCain’s, but it won’t be what Obama claims it is, either.

Overall:
• On a 1-0 scale, I’ll give Obama a 7.75 and McCain a 6.5. They both get scored down on the education issues, which is a pet peeve of mine.

But, don’t be satisfied with my summary. Hopefully, I’ve whetted your appetite, without making your eyes glaze over, to read their answers for yourself.

Or, you can read the NYT take on their statements.

On the coffee table – ‘Censoring Science’

If you want to know just how far BushCo has gone in collaboration with Big Oil and Big Coal in general, and folks like ExxonMobil and Peabody in particular, to censor sound science on anthropogenic global warming and its degree of certainty, this is THE book to read.

If you want to understand how this censoring, while it starts with the attacks on James Hanson, goes far beyond that, throughout NASA and onto the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this book has the details.

If you want to see how this attack came out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to the degree a paper/e-mail/phone log trail was left, this book will connect the dots.

If you aren’t familiar with the major players in global warming denialism, how they stole pages from Big Tobacco’s cancer denialism (ironic that global warming denialist Richard Lindzen, a smoker, denies the tobacco-cancer link, too), and how “global warming denialism” has been respun into “global warming skepticism,” you need to read this book.

And … it will connect the dots on the stellar scientific research of Dr. James Hansen, who should have been at Stockholm last December with Al Gore and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change head Rajendra K. Pachauri as the third Nobelist, a voice sounding the alarm on global warming for 20 years.

Author Mark Bowen, with a Ph.D. in physics himself, knows the value of free scientific discourse. That, along with the career and achievements of Hansen himself, intertwine in this book.

How bad is the attack on science? NASA’s mission statement used to include the phrase, ‘To understand and protect our home planet.” In late 2006, that phrase was removed, about the time NASA Administrator Michael Griffin started machete-whacking the budget for Earth science.

Illiterate science journalism at Morning News confuses nature and nurture

In a health story today at The Dallas Morning News, (don’t forget the initial capital!) freelancer (I’m sorry, “special contributor”) Elsa K. Simcik made a whopper of a mistake on nature vs. nurture. She says:

Reed also didn't realize that being African-American automatically put her at high risk for developing colon cancer. According to the American Cancer Society Web site, “African-Americans have the highest colorectal cancer incidence and mortality rates of all racial groups in the United States.”

Yes, but there is NO definite evidence linking anything genetic in African-Americans to the higher colon cancer rates, therefore, Martha Reed was NOT “automatically” anything.

There are a variety of environmental risk factors, to be sure. Lower screening rates and detection often being in more advanced states of cancer both contribute to the higher fatality rate. Traditional black foods, higher in saturated fats and lower in fiber, are certainly likely contributory to higher rates of occurrence.

BUT … those are all “nature” factors, not “nurture” ones.

As for claims of genetic-driven difference, all of them are weak at this stage, and even if they do pan out with more research, nonetheless, their effects will be seen as much smaller than the environmentally-caused ones.

I know the Snooze got rid of its fantastic science editor, Tom Siegfried, in what seems like an eon ago. But, that’s not an excuse for not having at least a staff writer with some science writing doing this story.