The Internet is a stupid place...

This isn't really news to anyone; we all know about lolcats and trolls and whatever dumb internet memes you care to think of. Those are dumb in the sense that they're intentionally silly, but being a frequent peruser of the internet means you have to constantly to be on guard for another kind of dumb: the really actually dumb. Here's two examples:

This sleep infographic which I found while stumbling is a fine example of why infographics are generally bullshit statistics dressed up with fancy graphs and cartoons. It doesn't take long to find out that whoever made this basically made up numbers on the spot. The first statistic, in fact, states that not sleeping will double your chance of breast cancer and then goes on to state that your risk of breast cancer will increase by 200%. This isn't even a matter of bad statistics, it's a matter of bad (terrible) math. Doubling does not equal an increase of 200%; an increase of 100% would be double. An increase of 200% is equivalent to tripling the amount. But, what's even worse is that we're talking about risk (probability), which is already measured in percentage. What this graphic would lead me to believe, then, is that without sleep my risk of breast cancer should increase by 200% on top of the original. Say I originally had a risk of 1% then, without sleep, my risk of getting breast cancer should increase to 201%. I think that speaks for itself.

Just to drive this point home, the graph also says that without enough sleep your risk of dying in the next 20 years increases by 20%. There's no reference here. I'm 20 years old, so I'll  be 40 in 20 years; but what if I was 50 and reading the same article? A 20% chance of dying at 70? Maybe. But I'd like to believe that I have less than a 20% chance of dying at the age of 40 even if I tend to wake up early, call me an optimistic.

Whoever makes these things probably has some sort of source; I think the problem is that they misread and misreport whatever source they have. The fact that this author in particular lacked basic arithmetical knowledge says a lot about how trustworthy his information is.

My second example is this article by the BBC, with the amazing headline Are humans still evolving by Darwin's natural selection? I love that it's Darwin's natural selection, as if there are other kinds, but this one belongs to him. It's so sad that this is on the BBC, which is supposed to be a reputable news source, and that this is considered news. This whole article stems from a blatant misunderstanding of natural selection:

"So clearly our technology and inventions didn't stop us evolving in the past. But what about today?"

It asks, as if technology really had anything to do with it. Here are the two requirements we as a species need for natural selection to take place:
1. we need to be able to reproduce
2. we need to be able to die
So long as we're having children, and passing on our genes, and some of us are dying before we can pass on our genes, we will be constantly evolving as a species. Natural selection is completely compatible with the idea that animals interact with and affect their environment, technology being an example of such an interaction (see Wikipedia's article on fitness).

In fact, we don't even need to be able to die. So long as we're reproducing we're effectively making a choice about which offspring to bring into the future, and so long as there's that choice (i.e. not all possible offspring are brought into existence), natural selection is inevitable.

I'm not really going anywhere with this. I'm not about to go on a never ending endeavor to try and correct all the misinformation on the internet. But, if there's something to take away from this it's that you can't trust anything on the internet. Check sources, cross examine, etc. etc.