Spend enough time following the reporting of science in mainstream media, and you may latch on to the central problem to reporting on science in the mainstream media: it’s often not very good. Many times non-scientific centered news outlets do their best to cover the nuances of a peer reviewed study and fall a little short, and sometimes they just run with the juicy headline that some quack put together, nuances be damned.
So it’s always nice to see the quack in question being penalized for trying to pass off dubious science as considerable fact to a gullible media, most recently in the case of Satoshi Kanazawa and his study entitled Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?
The study is currently only available in a Google cache of Psychology Today, because the magazine pulled the post down off of their website shortly after a great number of people noticed that the article was basically a messy ball of extrapolation from a study that Kanazawa did not run himself and that was not intended to gather data for the purpose he was using it for, which was to be an “objective” record of “beauty” in men and women of different races. However, instead of acknowledging the shaky foundations of his statements, Kanazawa used them to conjecture that black women are (remember, “objectively”) less attractive because they have more masculine features due to having more testosterone than people of other races. On the way he makes sure to point out, without citation (other than one of his own studies) or prevarication, that black women are fatter and less intelligent than everyone else. I’m not even joking. For the definitive itemization of the flaws in his research and conclusions, visit Racialicious.
Fortunately for everyone’s sanity, the student union at the London School of Economics, where Kanazawa works, have successfully, unanimously, voted in favor of firing him, and the the school itself has begun to investigate and evaluate the many dubious claims made in his papers to decided whether he should receive academic punishment. Which just goes to show: sometimes when you do bad science with a snappy headline, you get a lot of attention.
And sometimes when you do bad science with a snappy headline, you get more attention than you can handle.
(via Jezebel.)
