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    Annotations on a Tweet-Storm Directed More-or-Less Toward Neil deGrasse Tyson

    by Jeremy Yoder Mar 18, 2016 4 minutes

    On Saturday afternoon, while I really should have been working on other things, this happened:

    What’s going on here? It might be obvious if you have a background in biology, but there’s a lot of context, and science, behind that tweet. It all started last Friday, when astrophysicist and popular science personality Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted:

    This is actually false on its face, since there are of species , or at least it looks like it must be. Tyson’s responses and @-mentions filled up with biologists and science communicators pointing out , , and other ways that animal mating systems get . A spoof hashtag, , encouraged biologists to by tweeting (deliberately, hilariously) uninformed descriptions of astronomical phenomena. All of which is to say, it was a pretty fun Friday on Science Twitter.

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