If you’re a regular consumer of memes, then you’ve likely heard of the widely used herbicide atrazine. Conspiracy theory broadcaster Alex Jones mentioned the chemical in a now-viral segment claiming it “turns the frog gay.” Jones had based his claims on research by a Berkeley biology professor named Tyrone Hayes. In 2002, Hayes published a study that claimed to find “hermaphroditic, demasculinized frogs after exposure to the herbicide atrazine at low ecologically relevant doses.”
Though it was dressed up as science and eventually became a meme, those claims were not peer-reviewed, and Hayes never provided data to back up his conclusions. Oddly enough, none of the other 7,000-plus scientific studies that established the safety of atrazine ever came to the same conclusion.
