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+--- Thread: A tale of misinformation: The Avocado (/Thread-A-tale-of-misinformation-The-Avocado)
A tale of misinformation: The Avocado - Maxmars - 05-14-2024
I would like to begin by congratulating and commending the folks over at SciShow, and Hank Green - I would consider these folks not to be 'spreaders of misinformation'... at least not intentionally.
I came across this because of their YouTube presence, and the fact that I too love avocados, generally speaking.
But during the course of the video some very interesting facts came were confirmed... facts that are particularly relevant to my interest in what we call misinformation (and disinformation when purposefully communicated.)
The synopsis is this. Ground Sloths, and other large herbivores during the Pleistocene Era are not the reason Avocados (with their relatively huge pits) were disseminated across the southern American continent. It is unlikely that they had anything to do with their spread - there is no evidence to even hint at this idea. But since the 1980's that was the predominately promulgated "scientific fact" in academia and thus, media reporting (sadly, SciShow inadvertently spread this for a bit too.) The subject treatment focuses on the avocado itself, but my intention is to show "how" this became the stuff of conversations in the world.
The thing I want to focus on is shared in the video... the narrator, Hank Green, discloses that a scientific paper published in the 80s mentioned that large animals (like the mastodon) ought to also be considered as 'dispersers of seeds' in the Costa Rica region, not only birds and other small herbivores. That paper made no mention of Avocados... but later that year, another paper published extended the hypothesis that maybe the idea applied to avocados consumed by ground sloths as well. SciShow covers this at approximately the 1 minute 40 second mark - pointing out that neither paper included any data about avocados, nor ground sloths.
Hank then says "I guess it was just really easy to get papers published in the 80's."
Since we here have offered several threads and reports about paper mills, and retracted "published" "peer-reviewed" papers today... one might say that was a gross understatement... because no-one was paying close attention to the abusive practices (plagiarism, fraud, and recycled errors) in the 'scientific publication' "industry" back then... but I suspect it was no better then than has been proven to be now.
At any rate, my heart-felt admiration for SciShow folks who remedied the error expeditiously... reminding us all that there remains out there, in the world of monetized video, those people who aren't going to just 'publish and forget' the information they offer.
Thanks for clearing that up... and thank you for what you do.
