The boiling frog story is a widespread anecdote describing a frog slowly being boiled alive.
The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it
is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be
cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness
of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually.
According to contemporary biologists the premise of the story is not literally true; a frog
submerged and gradually heated will jump out. However, some 19th-century experiments suggested
that the underlying premise is true, provided the heating is sufficiently gradual.
Cultural usage
The boiling frog story is generally told in a metaphorical context, with the upshot being
that people should make themselves aware of gradual change lest they suffer eventual undesirable
consequences. This may be in support of a slippery slope argument. It is also used in
business to illustrate the idea that change needs to be gradual to be accepted. The expression
"boiling frog syndrome" is sometimes used as shorthand for the metaphor.
The story has been retold many times and used to illustrate many different points. It has
been used to warn about diverse phenomena, for example: in 1960 about sympathy towards
the Soviet Union during the Cold War; in 1980 about the impending collapse of civilization
anticipated by survivalists; in the 1990s about inaction in response to climate change
and staying in abusive relationships. It has also been used by libertarians to warn about
slow erosion of civil rights. In the 1996 novel The Story of B, environmentalist
author Daniel Quinn spends a chapter on the metaphor of the boiling frog, using it to
describe human history, population growth and food surplus. Pierce Brosnan's character
Harry Dalton mentioned it in the 1997 disaster movie Dante's Peak in reference to the accumulating
warning signs of the volcano's reawakening. Al Gore used a version of the story in his
presentations and the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth to describe ignorance about global warming.
In his version the frog is rescued before it is harmed. This use of the story was referenced
ironically by writer/director Jon Cooksey in the title of his 2010 comedic documentary
How to Boil a Frog. In philosophy the boiling frog story has been
used as a way of explaining the sorites paradox. This paradox describes a hypothetical heap
of sand from which individual grains are removed one at a time, and asks if there is a specific
point when it can no longer be defined as a heap.
Scientific background
Several experiments involving recording the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water took
place in the 19th century. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location
of the soul, German physiologist 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. Other experiments showed that frogs did not
attempt to escape gradually heated water. An 1872 experiment by Heinzmann demonstrated
that a normal frog would not attempt to escape if the water was heated slowly enough, which
was corroborated in 1875 by Fratscher. Goltz raised the temperature of the water
from 17.5 °C to 56 °C in about ten minutes, or 3.8 °C per minute, in his experiment
which prompted normal frogs to attempt to escape, whereas Heinzmann heated the frogs
over the course of 90 minutes from about 21 °C to 37.5 °C, a rate of less than 0.2 °C
per minute. One source from 1897 says, "in one experiment the temperature was raised
at a rate of 0.002°C per second, and the frog was found dead at the end of 2½ hours
without having moved." In 1888 William Thompson Sedgwick explained
the apparent contradiction between the results of these experiments as a consequence of different
heating rates used in the experiments: "The truth appears to be that if the heating be
sufficiently gradual, no reflex movements will be produced even in the normal frog;
if it be more rapid, yet take place at such a rate as to be fairly called 'gradual', it
will not secure the repose of the normal frog under any circumstances".
Modern sources tend to dispute that the phenomenon is real. In 1995, Professor Douglas Melton,
of the Harvard University Biology department, said, "If you put a frog in boiling water,
it won't jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets
hot—they don't sit still for you." Dr. George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians
at the National Museum of Natural History, also rejected the suggestion, saying that
"If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out."
In 2002 Dr. Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma,
with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that "The legend is entirely
incorrect!". He described how the critical thermal maximum for many frog species has
been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or
1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually
jumps out if the container allows it. Commentary
Law professor and legal commentator Eugene Volokh commented in 2003 that regardless of
the behavior of real frogs, the boiling frog story is useful as a metaphor, comparing it
to the metaphor of an ostrich with its head in the sand. Economics Nobel laureate and
New York Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman used the story as a metaphor in a July 2009 column,
while pointing out that real frogs behave differently. Journalist James Fallows has
been advocating since 2006 for people to stop retelling the story, describing it as a "stupid
canard" and a "myth". But following Krugman's column, he declared "peace on the boiled frog
front" and said that using the story is fine as long as you point out it's not literally
true. See also
References
Further reading Sedgwick, William. Studies From the Biological
Laboratory. Baltimore, Maryland: N. Murray, Johns Hopkins University
Offerman, Theo. "How to subsidize contributions to public goods"