QI has a team of researchers based in Holborn, London - but they are ultimately a comedy and entertainment vehicle so all their facts need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Yeah, and to be clear, I actually really like trivia! The front page of Wikipedia has a section called “Did You Know?” (DYK) that has six or seven pieces of daily trivia. These are also researched and follow a similar format. The key differences are that: 1) the corresponding article is right there if you want to immediately verify what’s been said, and 2) this article lets you understand the full context of the trivia if you want.
In this case, the most egregious part isn’t the trivia itself; it’s the kind of culture around trivia that it foments.
Before the first verified individual migrating birds in the 1800s (via finding storks with spears still in them after migrating to and from Africa) people had a lot of weird ideas about why birds weren’t there in the winter. “They fly so far it’s literally off any map you’ve seen” probably made as much sense to the average person as them flying to the moon, or burrowing into the mud at the bottom of ponds to hibernate.
The latter probably made the most sense to many people who lived rurally, because bank swallows (sand martins elsewhere) actually do nest in tunnels they’ve dug into the sand near bodies of water. To anyone who went without seeing one all winter and then suddenly saw one leaving a burrow in the spring, ‘it slept there all winter’ is a lot less of a leap than ‘it flew thousands of miles round trip and got back when you weren’t looking.’
Such fiction became science in the 1600s, according to Harrison, and greatly influenced Morton’s theory of the moon migration. But in 1676, a man named Francis Willughby set us down the path to avian truth when he published Ornithologia, a masterwork of bird science we can file with such classics as John James Audubon’s Birds of America. While Willughby, like Morton, refuted Aristotle’s notion that swallows hibernate, he wasn’t under the impression that they instead went to the moon. More modestly, it was to the warmth of northern Africa.
Though, it’s funny you mention the mud, given Aristotle’s belief that eels - which apparently lacked genitalia - just spontaneously generated from mud. Eels are weird, so I don’t fully blame him, but it’s so goddamn funny to think that they just spontaneously form into existence when it rains.
>no source
>“it was thought”? cool weasel wording; who thought it?
>tiny snippet offering zero context
>and then people parrot it uncritically
This is why I hate “le epic trivia!!”-style accounts; even when they’re right (and they’re often not), they’re intellectual junk food.
QI has a team of researchers based in Holborn, London - but they are ultimately a comedy and entertainment vehicle so all their facts need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Yeah, and to be clear, I actually really like trivia! The front page of Wikipedia has a section called “Did You Know?” (DYK) that has six or seven pieces of daily trivia. These are also researched and follow a similar format. The key differences are that: 1) the corresponding article is right there if you want to immediately verify what’s been said, and 2) this article lets you understand the full context of the trivia if you want.
In this case, the most egregious part isn’t the trivia itself; it’s the kind of culture around trivia that it foments.
Before the first verified individual migrating birds in the 1800s (via finding storks with spears still in them after migrating to and from Africa) people had a lot of weird ideas about why birds weren’t there in the winter. “They fly so far it’s literally off any map you’ve seen” probably made as much sense to the average person as them flying to the moon, or burrowing into the mud at the bottom of ponds to hibernate.
The latter probably made the most sense to many people who lived rurally, because bank swallows (sand martins elsewhere) actually do nest in tunnels they’ve dug into the sand near bodies of water. To anyone who went without seeing one all winter and then suddenly saw one leaving a burrow in the spring, ‘it slept there all winter’ is a lot less of a leap than ‘it flew thousands of miles round trip and got back when you weren’t looking.’
The OP provided in the link under context
Though, it’s funny you mention the mud, given Aristotle’s belief that eels - which apparently lacked genitalia - just spontaneously generated from mud. Eels are weird, so I don’t fully blame him, but it’s so goddamn funny to think that they just spontaneously form into existence when it rains.