Springtime for Mythbuster, Part II

Has anyone ever told you that you can't boil a frog by dropping it in boiling water since the frog will just jump out, but if you put the frog in a pot of cold water and turn the heat gradually, the frog will stay in even as the water starts to boil? It always irritates me when someone informs me of this clearly bogus "fact."

The first half of this myth ought to signal right away that this can't be true. If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it is going to be immediately scalded and die. Even being submerged in boiling water for only a few moments would cause horrific burns all over the body. Imagine if you were dunked in boiling water. Do you think you would have the presence of mind to leap out? Realize that you have merely seconds at the most before you die. Most likely, you'd spend those last few seconds of your life in a state of shock. So would the frog.

The basis of this urban legend apparently rests on the misconception that, since a frog is a cold-blooded animal, its internal temperature will be the same as the temperature of its environment, and it will therefore be unable to sense the gradual increase. However, no cold-blooded animal is actually that enslaved to the temperature of its environment.

Take the example of a desert lizard sunning itself on a rock. As the day gets hotter, how does it know when to get off the rock? If its intenal temperature matched its surroundings, and if that in turn makes it impossible for it to sense dangerous levels of heat, it couldn't. As gentle morning warmth turned into blistering noon, the lizard's body temperature would have acclimatized gradually as it unknowingly cooked itself alive on the rock.

This of course is not what happens in nature. When the lizard decides the rock is getting too hot, it climbs off and searches for shade. Reptiles and amphibians can tell just as easily as we mammals when their surrounding temperature has reached a dangerous level.

The myth of the frog in boiling water is used primarily to illustrate a popular theory about how social change takes place. This theory states that when social changes occur suddenly, people resist them, but when social changes are made gradually the populace will accept them even if as changes lead to radical transformation years down the road. There's only one thing wrong with this theory; the entire proof of its truthiness rests on the bogus fact about slow-boiled frogs.

Recent history provides countless examples to illustrate that sudden, precipitous, even violent action--not gradual, incremental adjustment--assures lasting societal change. The fascist regimes of the twentieth century seized power swiftly. The communist regimes took power through revolution. The sixties transformed Western culture in less than a decade. The abortion debate in America was radicalized overnight with a single Supreme Court decision. One Vatican council brought about changes to the Catholic Church that would have been unthinkable to her members just a few years prior.

So let that be today's lesson for you: If you want to kill a frog, don't try to boil it slowly.

Unless you have a pot with sides too high for the frog to jump over.

Or if you've bound the frog's hind legs with some twine so that it can't jump.

Or you could just cut off the frog's hind legs.

Or put a lid on the pot before you turn up the heat.

Or, if you want to watch the frog slowly boil, you could replace the lid with some wire mesh. Use a staple gun to secure the mesh to the pot.

But maybe you should start by taking a long look in the mirror and asking yourself why you are so hellbent on killing a frog through any of these cruel methods in the first place.

You sicko.