Boiling the frog

The CEO of ReturnPath (a startup company) blogs about some recent instances in which they "boiled the frog". This phrase comes about from the following observation:

If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap right back out.  But if you put a frog in a pot of water on the stove and then heat it up to boiling, you'll boil the frog because it never quite realized that it's being cooked until its muscles and brain are slightly too cooked to jump out.

When people say that they "boiled the frog" they mean that failed to react to some change because it happened over a long period of time. It's considerably easier to react to very dynamic changes than it is to recognize and react to something that happens very slowly and you see people doing this all the time. Even if you do recognize a trend, it can be very difficult to convince anyone else this is true due to the dismal knowledge of statistics in the population at large. There's only one problem with this analogy. The frog boiling story isn't true:

The legend is entirely incorrect! The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.