Link to column on the “frog in slowly heated water boiling alive” myth here.
James Fallows of The Atlantic has been reporting on this myth for years, and has collected an impressive body of references to uses of it and research about it here.
I realize that as near as I can tell he’s not referencing any research Cecil didn’t already know about, but he does link to some frog experts calling the story a crock, for example here.
I’m not sure why Cecil says that 2 degrees F increase per minute is not slow enough to really test the theory. That’s a very, very slow increase by any normal person’s measure, taking over an hour to heat room-temperature water to boiling. Yes, it’s not as slow as the original researcher, but why should one random guy set the international standard for slow frog boiling?
It also seems to me that you’d really need to show somehow that the temperature was affecting the frogs’ activity rates in a more rigorous way than just sticking the frog in a pan and slowly raising the temperature. Take too long and eventually the frog gets bored or hungry and jumps out. I’m guessing that if you just put a frog in a pan and don’t raise the temperature, it eventually jumps out 100% of the time.
Because[ol]
[li]any speed, no matter how slow, proves the original claim to be true, and[/li][li]we have a definite claim that Heinzmann’s speed was slow enough, and we can’t very well say that we’ve refuted it if we haven’t duplicated it.[/li][/ol]
which isn’t exactly accurate, since the work of Heinzmann and Fratscher can be reading through the citations in the histories of frog boiling. Unless he’s being very exact and only speaking of comparisons of brainless versus brained frogs. That having been said, Heinzmann also experimented on brainless frogs.
This was a bad column and **Cecil **should feel bad.
It was a bunch of hand-waving and dismissing. If he seea the problem with the experiments that ‘debunked’ the saying, and didn’t rectify it, he’s got nothing.
If he’s not willing to do the experiment, don’t write the column.
And he left that idiotic “wisdom” of the question’s asker un-snarked - at least tear that crap about how our society’s morals are crumbling today apart!
Even if I (and FTR no one else on the Straight Dope Staff wanted to do it either) did not have a moral objection to heating the frogs, I can imagine an incredible tsunami of outrage from the Teeming Millions over a frog-boiling experiment.
If one thinks they can control the temperature well enough such that one doesn’t injure or kill the frogs on accident, keeping in mind that thermal stress to amphibians isn’t an exact science, then they should go nuts and write up their findings.
Understandable, but nobody put a gun to Cecil’s freakishly large head and forced him to write about the claim that frogs will allow themselves to be boiled if the water is heated slowly enough, either. I’m sure you’re not hurting for questions.
On the other hand, given that this story is used as moral metaphor / analogy and presented as “true fact of nature” (although what amphibians have to do with human behaviour is never explained) the very fact that a proof of it can’t be found effectivly debunks it as use for making a point.
Similar to the story of the “guy freezing to death in a locked car when the cooling unit was off through the power of his mind” - never happened in real life. Or all those idiots talking about “natural laws” in regard to sex life, while being ignorant about how much variations animals have in their sex.
Back in college we had a lab that required pithing a frog, which involves basically sticking a pointy stick into its brain to kill it. There was one frog per group of 4 or 6 students. Somebody in each group had to pith the frog, and feeling like I was relatively the most morally corrupt person in the group, I volunteered to do it. It was pretty hard to stick the rod through the thing’s skull, I guess with practice one could find the ‘sweet spot’ and do it easily, but I only ever did it once.
Well anyway, it didn’t put up much of a fight. In fact it practically let me do it. But I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to kill a frog. This was over a decade ago, and just look at me today!
I always thought this story was true! Anyway a few days ago someone passed by our office and said, “don’t you smell that?” There were some chemical fumes and we didn’t notice, I think because the smell increased gradually. So this theory has some basis, in a non life threatening situation.
This is not the same thing. That human noises, or rather, the smell sensing cells inside them, adapt to any given smell after 30 min. is well known in science because of experiments. While this is interesting, it doesn’t carry the same metaphor/ analogy as frogs being boiled to death because they don’t notice that the temp. is dangerous.