The morass of lies

It will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I really hate it when people make shit up and then misrepresent it as the truth.

Now making shit up, by itself, is just fine.  I'm a fiction writer, so making shit up is kind of my main gig.  It's when people then try to pass it off as fact that we start having problems.  The problem is, sometimes the false information sounds either plausible, or cool, or interesting -- it often has a "wow!" factor -- enough that it then gets spread around via social media, which is one of the most efficient conduits for nonsense ever invented.

Here are three examples of this phenomenon that I saw just within the past twenty-four hours.

The first is about a Miocene-age mammal called Orthrus tartaros, "a distant relative of modern weasels," that was a scary hypercarnivore.  Here's an artist's conception of what Orthrus tartaros looked like:

Problem is, there's no such animal.  In Greek mythology, Orthrus was Cerberus's two-headed brother, who had been given the task of guarding the giant Geryon's cattle, and was killed by Heracles as one of his "Ten Labors."  "Tartaros," of course, comes from Tartarus, the Greek version of hell.  While there are plenty of animals named after characters from Greek myth, this ain't one of them.  In fact, it's the creation of a Deviant Art artist who goes by the handle Puijila, and specializes in "speculative evolution" art that was never intended to represent actual animals.  But along the way, someone swiped Puijila's piece and started passing it around as if it were real.

What's frustrating about this is that there are plenty of prehistoric animals that were scary as fuck, such as the absolutely terrifying gorgonopsids.  You don't need to pretend that an (admittedly extremely talented) artist's fictional creations are part of the real menagerie.

The second one cautioned the tender-hearted amongst us against catching spiders and putting them outdoors.  "Spiders in your house," the post said, "are adapted to living indoors.  95% of the spiders captured and released outside die within 24 hours.  Just let them live inside -- most of them are completely harmless."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ciar, House spider side view 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

While I agree completely that spiders have gotten an undeserved bad rap, and the vast majority of them are harmless (and in fact, beneficial, considering the number of flies and mosquitoes they eat), the rest of this is flat wrong.  Given that here in the United States, conventional houses have only become common in the past two hundred years or so, how did the ancestors of today's North American spiders manage before that, if they were so utterly dependent on living indoors?  And second, how did anyone figure out that "95% of the spiders captured and released died within 24 hours?"  Did they fit them with little radio tracking tags, or something?  This claim fails the plausibility test on several levels -- so while the central message of "learn to coexist with our fellow creatures" is well meant, it'd be nice to see it couched in facts rather than made-up nonsense.

The last one is just flat-out weird.  I'd seen it before, but it's popping up again, probably because here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's vegetable-garden-harvest time:

If you "didn't know this" it's probably because it's completely false.  Pepper plants have flowers that botanists call "perfect" (they contain both male and female parts), so they can self-pollinate.  The wall of a pepper -- the part you eat -- comes from the flower's ovary, so honestly, the edible parts of peppers are more female than male (even that's inaccurate if you know much about sexual reproduction in plants, which is pretty peculiar).  The number of bumps has zero to do with either sex or flavor.

So: one hundred percent false.  When you grow or buy peppers, don't worry about the number of bumps, and afterward, use them for whatever you like.

What puzzles me about all this is why anyone would make this kind of stuff up in the first place.  Why would you spend your time crafting social media posts that are certifiable nonsense, especially when the natural world is full of information that's even more cool and weird and mind-blowing, and is actually real?  Once such a post is launched, I get why people pass it along; posts like this have that "One True Fact That Will Surprise You!" veneer, and the desire to share such stuff comes from a good place -- hoping that our friends will learn something cool.

But why would you create a lie and present it as a fact?  That, I don't get.

Now, don't get me wrong; there's no major harm done to the world by people making a mistake and believing in the sexuality of peppers, doomed house spiders, and a Miocene hypercarnivorous weasel.  But it still bothers me, because passing this nonsense along establishes a habit of credulity.  "I saw it on the internet" is the modern-day equivalent of "my uncle's best friend's sister-in-law's cousin swears this is true."  And once you've gotten lazy about checking to see if what you post about trivia is true and accurate, it's a scarily small step to uncritically accepting and reposting falsehoods about much, much more important matters.

Especially given that there are a couple of media corporations I could name that survive by exploiting that exact tendency.

So I'll exhort you to check your sources.  Yes, on everything.  If you can't verify something, don't repost it.  To swipe a line from Smokey Bear, You Too Can Prevent Fake News.  All it takes is a little due diligence -- and a determination not to make the current morass of online lies any worse than it already is.

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