The Environment and the Myth of the Slow-Boiled Frog

On "The Daily Show" Monday night, the guest was Bob Woodruff of ABC News. He was flacking a new special called "Earth 2100." It's apparently about all the various environmental catastrophes that are rolling toward us if we don't do something. But the clip they showed wrecked any faith I might place in the special.

It was the tale of the slow-boiled frog: a frog put in a pot of water that is heated slowly enough won't notice the increase in heat and so will die. It's a fable with political consequences, an object lesson that if things go badly slowly enough, we'll all die before we notice. Woodward made this point to "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart.

Problem is, experts say that the story is a pile of frog droppings. Here's the Snopes page. And an item from Fast Company. The only evidence I can find to support the tale is a citation from experiments done in the late 1800s, which appears to have been the seed for the story. A report on this research from 1888 in the American Journal of Psychology notes that "it was much harder to boil intact and normal than brained or reflex frogs without sensation enough to cause motion."

To which I comment: No kidding. (BTW, "brained" frogs in this context are frogs whose brains have been mushed.)

My expertise with amphibians mainly consists of eating their sauteed legs. But the tale makes vanishingly little sense for a couple of reasons: An intact frog isn't going to stay still in a pot for very long, no matter what the temperature. Try it. And a frog is a cold-blooded critter. Cold-blooded animals tend to get more active as temperature increases, so a slow increase in heat would surely trigger some jumping even if the frog weren't aware of any particular danger due to pain.

OTOH, Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" didn't seem to suffer much from its use of the same story. So maybe I'll be unusual in my automatic turn-off toward the new special. And maybe if I watch the show, it will prove the story?

I bet not.