Last night WeatherGirl and I listened to PZ (“Pee Zed” in most of the English speaking world) Myers fine interview on BBC’s 5 Live as anticipated here earlier.
Apparently 5 Live had had some ID folk on last week spinning whatever nutcase yarns that they typically spin, and last night was to provide “balance”. (“Last week we had several speakers mention the importance of gravity, so this week we’ve brought on I.M. Wacko to discuss his claims that gravity is just an illusion brought about by the consumption of too much corn syrup in western diets.” Yeah, fair and balanced.) I was quite disappointed in the fellow that interviewed PZ, as he was frankly way too measured and “fair”, which gave the ID’ers a lot more credibility than they deserved. PZ did a good job, though, and nicely laid out the key issues (e.g., lack of anything resembling a testable theory).
Better in several ways was the segment that immediately followed, where a different presenter interviewed Phil Plait who runs the fun Bad Astronomy site. The second presenter opened with this bizarre clip of a guy speaking at a creationists education (shudder!) conference (shudder again!). This guy went through a whole list of evidence for why the universe is a wee bit older than that dust bunny under my couch, and then pronounced that because this contradicts the Bible, it’s all got to be wrong! That simple! We’re done! Wow… A truly remarkable performance, and we’re lucky to have this kind of bizarre thinking on tape. Wow… Again… So the presenter plays the clip and presents Plait with a wonderful opportunity to respond, which he made the most of. The two of them then ripped into ID quite nicely for several minutes, which was a real pleasure. It unfortunately left Plait zero time to discuss things like the moon hoax, which is what he thought he was being interviewed for, but this listener, at least, thought it was a fair trade.
In the discussions on both Paul and Phil‘s blogs several people have suggested that the two of them would make an excellent double act, and I must agree. I think that their areas of expertise and manners would complement each other quite nicely, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get in their way if they were gunning for some more of that crazy old wooly thinking.
The Beeb typically archives things like this for exactly a week, so you’ve got about 6 days to check it out before it disappears!
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