Boiling Frog Myth

         I was looking around on the internet for common herpetological myths and came across this "boiling frog paradox". It immediately caught my attention because I had never even heard of it before so I thought it might be interesting to enlighten myself so I looked into it some more.
         The boiling frog paradox is a widespread story about a frog being slowly boiled alive. It states that if a frog is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive danger and will be killed. According to studies this myth is nothing more than that, a myth. There have been several experiments that have been preformed since the 19th century to prove or disprove this myth. German psychologist Friedrich Goltz was conducting experiments searching for the location of the soul in 1869. He demonstrated that if you removed the brain from a frog that it would remain in the slowly heated water, but those frogs that did not have their brains removed attempted to escape the water. Goltz raised the temperature of the water from 17.5 degrees C to 56 degrees C in about 10 minutes, which was at a rate of about 3.8 degrees C per minute. Another experiment conducted in 1872 by Heinzmann showed that a normal frog would not attempt to escape if the water was heated slowly enough. He heated the frogs over a 90 minute period from 21 degrees C to 37.5 degrees C, increasing the temperature at a rate of 0.2 degrees C per minute. One source from 1897 says, "in one experiment the temperature was raised at a rate of 0.002 degrees C per second, and the frog was found dead at the end of 2 and a half hours without having moved". In 1888 William Thompson Sedgwick pointed out the obvious contradiction between these two experiments stating, "The truth appears to be that if the heating be sufficiently gradual, no reflex movement 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 response of the normal frog under any circumstances". More modern sources argue that the phenomenon is accurate. In 1995, Professor Douglas Melton, of the Biology department at Harvard University 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 out before it gets hot--they don't sit still for you." Most modern sources state that the legend is completely incorrect.
        Today, the myth is mostly used as a metaphor. The metaphor is used to explain to people that they should make themselves aware of gradual change and lessen the suffering of 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 happen gradually in order to be accepted. In 1980 it was used to describe the impending collapse of civilization anticipated but survivalist. In the 1990s about inaction in response to climate change. In 1960 it was used towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the movie Dante's Peak, Pierce Brosnan's character mentioned it in reference to the accumulating warning signs of the volcano's reawakening. The movie I'm sure most are familiar with, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, he used it to describe ignorance about global warming. Gore changed the metaphor a little bit and in his version the frog is rescued before it is harmed.