The phrase "boiling a frog in warm water" is often used as a metaphor for "people's inability or unwillingness to notice or react to a threat that arises gradually", and originates from the story of a frog being slowly boiled to death. "If you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly heat it up, the frog will not notice the danger and will be boiled to death".

The above conclusion was later proved wrong by scientific experiments, but the story has been passed down as a fable and is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to notice or react to a threat that gradually arises.

Moral: Changes in the big picture can make the difference between success and failure. We must always be aware, learn, be alert, and welcome change, as it is sometimes invisible.

Too comfortable environment often contains danger. A lifestyle that is habitual is perhaps the most threatening to you. The only way to change this is to keep innovating and breaking old patterns. The best way to discover the best way to change is to "stop" and think differently when you notice a small change in the trend, and to learn.

Scientific evidence

In 1869, the German scientist Gertz designed an experiment in search of the "soul". When a frog with its brain cut off was placed in cold water and heated slowly, the frog was boiled to death inside; when a normal frog was treated in the same way, the frog would try to jump out. In his experiment, Gertz heated the water from 17.5 to 56 degrees Celsius, averaging 3.8 degrees Celsius per minute of warming.

In 1872, Huntsman declared experimentally that frogs had no intention of jumping out if the rate of heating was low enough. In his experiment, Huntsman heated water from 21°C to 37.5°C in 90 minutes, averaging less than 0.2°C per minute of warming.

The experiment has since been done by Hodgson, a professor of zoology at the University of Oklahoma, who chose a heating rate of 1.1 degrees Celsius per minute. Hodgson found that after a certain temperature, the frogs would begin to stir and try to escape the environment.

In March 2014, Zheng Yu and four other students from Guangzhou University's School of Life Sciences specialized in this experiment. They put a certain amount of water at 20 degrees Celsius in a beaker and placed tiger frogs in it to heat it up.

They found that the frogs would jump out of the water when the temperature of the water in the beaker increased, instead of staying boiled to death in the water. The average jump-out temperature was 30°C at 440mL of water and 32.8°C at 800mL.

Reference: Baidu Encyclopedia - Boiled Frog in Warm Water