"It is as hard to kill the
boiling frog metaphor
as it is to kill
an actual boiling frog.
Even though people keep saying that the slow human response to climate change makes us “like the proverbial frog in boiling water” — or that “the Universal Windows Platform is like Facebook and a boiling frog” — the metaphor/simile is not merely a cliché. It isn’t even accurate… it seems like a good time to explain once again why this cliché should be retired."
Wikipedia explains that Victorian physiology researcher:
“ Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.”
However, in 2015, Atlantic writer James Fallows authored The Boiled Frog Watch Returns noting that an 1888 report in Studies from the Biological Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University found that frogs with brains are in fact smart enough to leap out of water when it gets hot:
Citing his own 2013 essay, "Can we please throw the boiling frog metaphor into some boiling water?” Fallows argued that the metaphor being "flat wrong":
" is just a “minor problem. The major problem is that it is such a damned cliché.”
So in homage to the most celebrated authority on the jumping behavior of American frogs, Mr. Samuel Clemens, Congress should celebrate the frog-jumping and salvation season by ordering the Federal Behavioral Science establishment to invest in advancing the cause of diversity by employing more frogs in censorship cliché research under the auspices of President Obama's Executive order 13707 , The Behavioral Science Insights Executive Order.
Admirable as decerebrate frogs may be as experimental proxies for think-tank inhabitants and internet censors, the NAS should encourage work focused on frogs with brains, for as Goltz wisely pointed out, the behavioral repertoire of those without them is decidedly limited.
