so I would advise that in commenting on scientific matters it might be wise to ask their opinion.
Listening recently to BBC Radio 5 Live, a series of infuriating ‘trails’ in which pairs of presenters preened about their mutual wonderfulness made me wish to burst both ear drums to end the misery. In the end I settled for simply unplugging the wireless.
Their latest offering opines ‘Evolution happens for a reason..’ (the promotion of digital radio, it transpires).
Pray tell BBC? While I strongly suspect that the upper echelons of your organization, like most of the media, are heavily infested with arts and humanities graduates there must be a B.Sc. or two a mere phone call away.
I have heard several BBC science reporters both talking and writing good sense (although science on BBC TV is increasingly sparse), and I am sure any of them would have observed to the ‘creative’ involved that evolution is simply a process that operates without reason. Reason clearly implies an intelligence behind the process, and I hope the BBC is not suggesting such a thing.
The BBC pushes Digital Audio Broadcasting* at every opportunity, amid worries that it was a rash system to adopt and that it may be at risk of evolution’s corollary: extinction.
Something I wish would happen to BBC Radio 5 Live’s intensely irritating trails.
Although I haven’t listened to the ‘trails’ and so can’t really comment, isn’t this just a matter of sloppy language? I have been castigated on these very fora for berating a colleague who used ‘designed’ to refer to an enzyme.
Consider the sentence,
‘The reason evolution happens is that changes in the environment select for organisms that can compete more effectively’.
It’s a pretty lousy sentence syntactically, but logically I think it’s fair.
So maybe we need more English-speaking A&H graduates in the BBC, rather than fewer?