Factoids

I hate the Internet.

One of the downsides of communication technology, like e-mail, is that its just as easy to circulate untrue things as true things. After jokes, another popular type of e-mail that makes the rounds between friends is the “Did you know...?” variety, usually with a list of short one-line “factoids.” No references, no explanations.

I got one of these yesterday, and spotted a couple of alleged “facts” that, fortunately, other people had already taken the time to puncture. For instance...

“A duck’s quack doesn’t echo.” Fortunately, Straight Dope columnist Cecil Adams dealt with this one here.

One that really grabbed my attention, because I'd never heard it before, was the claim that all polar bears are left-handed.

Wow. The mind reels with questions. For instance...

Who thought that one up? This page suggests this was derived from native folklore; this is apparently supported in this article on, of all things, transgendered bears.

Would this “fact” be making the rounds if the claim was that all polar bears were right-handed? Probably not; I suspect that a difference from what’s typical in humans is part of the fascination with the claim.

Is it true? polarbearsalive.org lists it as a myth, here. This page claims there’s real scientific observations to support this, but gives no references, which makes me mighty suspicious. One thing to consider, though: would you really expect all bears to be left-handed? There's definitely handedness in humans, but nobody would say we're all right-handed.

How would you know? In humans, we normally take “handedness” to mean the hand we write with; care to try to get a bear to pick up a ballpoint and scribble a few words? Seriously, though, how you would show that sort of preference is an interesting problem.

Is it scientifically plausible? Okay, I have an advantage on this one, because I have a fair amount of training in animal behaviour and neurobiology, so I remembered reading an article about animal handedness. This short article from Scientific American backs what I vaguely recalled: handedness in behaviour of an entire species is not well documented for any species besides humans. Handedness in humans is thought to be related to the specialization of the two halves of our brain (see here).

I was able to find all this info to stick pins into this claim, while I’m tempted at this point to reverse my earlier statement and say, “I love the Internet.” But I’m still a little depressed. A search for “polar bear” and “left handed” yielded dozens of pages saying, “All polar bears are left-handed,” but nothing else, which far outnumber the few more substantive articles I collected above.

I am a little sympathetic to people for buying this claim. After all, it”s not as though most of us have ready access to polar bears to watch for a few weeks and record what they do with their paws.

But there are still a lot of untrue things that people believe, even though they are shown to be untrue easily. Ever hear that you can only balance an egg on the day of the equinox? Try it today, while the fall equinox is still over a week away. It takes some doing, but it can be done.

The morale of the story? For me, a factoid like “left-handed polar bears” reminds me of one of, if not the most useful questions I have as a scientist: “What is the evidence?”

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Good sites for tracking down common urban legends include The Straight Dope and the Urban Legends reference pages.

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Correction to earlier entry: Previously, I talked about the costs of accrediting an institution. Apparently, I misread – the application fee is for the initial accreditation for the institution. A “substantial change” may only require a fee of $300 – plus 125% of the cost for an accreditation committee to visit the campus.

Photo by Valerie on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.