Category: radio

What were the first animals?

October 31, 2018 • 11:45 am

by Matthew Cobb

I’ve just finished making a BBC World Service radio programme about the first animals. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can listen to it (it’s only 28 minutes long!) – you just have to register with the BBC (free, rapid and cost- and spam-free). Click on the pic to go to the BBC website:

The programme deals with two different ways that researchers are studying this question – by looking at fossils, and at DNA. In both cases I interview researchers and – in the case of the Ediacara – get to handle some fossils. I also ate some 600 million year embryos at Bristol University (to see what they tasted like, obviously), but we didn’t include that in the programme. . .

The fossil data relate to what are called the Ediacaran biota – strange fossils from before the Cambrian, around 570 million years ago. The fossils are very hard to interpret – they don’t look like much alive today – but an amazing technique for analysing cholesterol molecules in the rock, so organic molecules preserved for all that time, has confirmed that Dickinsonia, the thing in the picture above, was an animal. Other techniques involve looking at large numbers of Ediacaran fossils and seeing how their distribution relates to those of modern animals. All the data suggest that some of the Ediacaran weirdos were indeed animals, although we cannot know if they are the ancestors of any animal alive today.

The DNA data focuses on a different question, which DNA can answer – which of the groups of animals alive today was the first to branch off the tree of life? Traditionally there has been a straightforward answer to this: sponges, which are nerveless and tissueless. But 10 years ago comparative genomic studies dropped a bombshell – they suggested that the first group to branch off were the ctenophores or comb jellies. This has caused a huge row because it would mean either that nerves evolved twice – once in the ctenophores, and once in our ancestors, after the nerveless sponges branched off – or that the huge sponge group somehow lost the genes for producing nerves.

Many biologists (myself included) don’t like either of these options, and prefer the sponges as the first model, but the data are persistent. Or are they? I spoke to experts on both sides of this argument, which has caused quite a hoo-haa in the zoological community for the past decade.

Anyway, go ahead and have a listen – download it and listen to it on public transport or while you are exercising. NB: I made the programme with ace producer Andrew Luck-Baker.

If you are a teacher, especially if you teach animal evolution, please get your students to listen to it.

Infinite Monkey Cage: Episode 100

July 12, 2018 • 8:45 am

The Infinite Monkey Cage, the entertaining BBC science and comedy show hosted by Robin Ince and Brian Cox, has just celebrated its 100th episode. You can hear the hour-long show at the link below; Matthew, who was in the audience. commented:

They have a couple of vicars on it, heaven knows why, one an ex rockstar who is always in the radio and the other doesn’t really seem to believe in the Bible at all. They got some snarky comments from Eric Idle and Alice Roberts. [JAC: One of Alice’s tweets is below.]

Here are the participants and those in charge:

To hear the show, click on the screenshot below and then the arrow at lower left:

There’s also a video version here (via @bbciplayer), but it’s not visible outside the UK. Matthew notes, “I’m in the front row next to Nick Lane next to Steve Jones. Virtually all the VIP audience members (= ex-panelists) were from University College London, but none of the panelists on this episode were.”

 

 

NPR’s interview with Anthony Bourdain

June 9, 2018 • 1:15 pm

Instead of mourning the death of Anthony Bourdain, which I doubt he’d want, let’s listen to a nice 37-minute interview he did with Dave Davies on NPR’s “Fresh Air” two years ago. Click on the screenshot to go there; it’s a nice overview of Bourdain’s life and gives you a good feel for the man:

A quote:

“I’m happiest experiencing food in the most purely emotional way. And it’s true of most of my chef friends as well. When it’s, like, street food or a one-chef, one-dish operation, or somebody who’s just really, really good at one or two or three things that they’ve been doing for a very long time, that’s very reflective of their ethnicity or their culture or their nationality — those are the things that just make me happy.

I’m spoiled, like a lot of fellow chefs. We get a lot of fine wines and dinners thrown our way and you do reach this enviable point where you just don’t want to sit there for four hours, with course after course after course. It’s too much, first of all. It doesn’t feel good at the end of that time, and it’s not interesting. And if the waiter is taking 10 minutes to describe each dish [and] it’ll only take you three to eat it, something’s really wrong. I think people lose sight of the fact that chefs should be ultimately in the pleasure business, not in the look-at-me business.”

Nick Cohen’s BBC show, “The silence of the liberals”

March 6, 2018 • 1:00 pm

“We are watching the astonishing spectacle of non-Muslims telling actual Muslims that they’re anti-Muslim bigots”

  —Nick Cohen (11:06 in the show)

 

I’ve often spoken how the American Left and its feminist wing largely ignore the misogyny and oppression of women in Muslim countries of the Middle East. The main reason, of course, is that Muslims are considered “people of color”, which apparently trumps the rights of those having two X chromosomes. But another excuse is that “we should deal with women’s problems closer to home and not those in distant countries.”

That excuse, however, doesn’t apply in the UK, where endemic Muslim communities also practice oppression—not just of women, but of gays, apostates, and atheists. And that’s in the West.  And as in the US, the UK Left shies away from addressing Muslim sexism and misogyny. In this BBC Radio 4 show, Observer columnist Nick Cohen, whose Leftist credentials are impeccable (read his books here and here), exposes the UK Left’s neglect of homophobia and endemic sexism among their countries’ Mulsims, as well as the Left’s lack of support for Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz and ex-Muslim reformers like Maryam Namazie.

Here’s the BBC’s summary:

 Observer columnist and writer Nick Cohen thinks mainstream liberal culture and left-wing politicians are failing to help progressive Muslims who want to fight inequalities endorsed by culture and religion in their their communities. He calls this the “racism of the anti-racist”.

Forty years ago, Edward Said coined the term “Orientalism” to condemn the West’s patronising representations of the “exotic” East, whose inhabitants were too irrational to handle the freedoms Americans and Europeans enjoyed.

In this programme, Nick Cohen examines evidence that this old colonial condescension is re-emerging in 2018, He interviews frustrated Muslims tackling discrimination – Muslims who feel betrayed by the Liberal left who, they say, should be their natural allies in their campaigning for women’s rights and tackling discrimination such as homophobia in Muslim communities.

In this authored documentary, Nick draws from the experiences of a range of organisations and progressive Muslim individuals – Tell Mama which supports victims of anti-Muslim hate crime, Maryam Namazie from One Law for All campaigning for women’s rights against Islamic Sharia law and Jewish Beth din courts, and Amina Lone who says her outspoken views including a campaign against young girls wearing the hijab in school led to her losing her seat as a Manchester city councillor. The local Labour party failed to re-select her, blaming her attendance record.

Tell Mama founder Fiyaz Mugal’s said that those who’raised their head above the parapet to speak out were intimidated and threatened, not only by the white far right but also by Islamist extremists, while Maajid Nawaz founder of counter-extremism organisation Quilliam was on a Jihadist’s hit list.

As Peter Tatchell notes in the show, the failure of the British Left to support Muslims reformers fighting for basic human rights has denied those Lefists the moral authority to be an effective force in British politics. Somehow, intersectionalism doesn’t intersect when the oppressed groups are a. women and b. Muslims.

Click on the screenshot to go to the 28-minute show:

h/t: Grania

Matthew on The Infinite Monkey Cage

January 30, 2018 • 10:00 am

Matthew was too reticent to tell me that he appeared on yesterday’s Radio 4 episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage with Robin Ince and Brian Cox. The 30-minute episode is “The Teenage Brain”, and you can download it by going to the site below (click on the screenshot). Besides Matthew Cobb (professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester), we have Scottish comedian Rory Bremner and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist at University College London.

The topic:

 Stomping off to your bedroom, being embarrassed by your parents, wanting to fit in with your peers and a love of risky behaviour are all well known traits associated with our teenage years, exasperating parents through the ages. But new research into dynamic changes going on in the brain during these key years has revealed that it’s not just hormones that are responsible for these behaviours. Could a better understanding of what is going on during these formative years not only help teenagers themselves, but inform our education system and even help prevent many of the mental health problems that often begin during adolescence?

As usual, the show is a mixture of good-natured banter, comedy, and hard science:

h/t: Kevin

BBC’s Today program honors 60 years of science reporting

September 13, 2017 • 9:00 am

Reader Dom called my attention to two BBC pieces on science that were broadcast yesterday, the 60th anniversary of The Today “programme”. The two bits have been concatenated into one 19-minute broadcast, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below and then clicking the right arrow when you get to the BBC site:

The participants and a brief summary:

Steve Jones (beginning to 10:15), my old mate and emeritus professor of genetics at University College London, reports on how BBC science reporting has changed since he was a young lad listening to the broadcast. In short, he says, it’s become less worshipful and more critical—a change that Jones doesn’t see as entirely salutary. He briefly reviews several big science stories over the last few decades, including the “mad cow” beef scare, Andrew Wakefield’s phony claims about vaccines and autism (Jones sees this as a “The Big Car Crash” of science reporting, which taught the press a lesson in cynicism), and reporting on climate change, which, according to Steve, emphasizes the media’s structural difficulty of dwelling “controversy” when it should be dealing more with what science really produces: consensus. Steve is, usual, eloquent.

Richard Dawkins and David Willetts (former science minister; both 10:15-end). Willetts talks about the difficulty of making political policy about science, but then states baldly that politicians must adjudicate the science itself. That gets Richard’s dander up, as he properly wants scientists and not politicians to judge scientific truth. I like Richard’s two statements on the source of truth, the second of which is this: “When it comes down to it, science is the only way, finally, to know what’s really true.” The moderator says, “There’s that word ‘true’ again, isn’t it?” Richard says, “Yes; I don’t apologize for that,” and the moderator adds a dubious “Mmmmh.” Willetts once again notes that political policy is not solely concerned with scientific truth, but with people’s valuations of truth as well as their personal interests.

Right enough, but so what? Willetts and Dawkins appear to be talking at cross-purposes, but there’s a lesson here, and of course I dwell on it because it’s m own view:  truths about the world can be established only by science, or by what I call “science broadly construed”—the toolkit  of doubt, experimentation, observation, testing, falsifiability, and consensus  that characterizes the work of not only professional scientists, but also those like historians, archaeologists, and plumbers who are trying to find out what’s true about our Universe—including where our pipes are leaking.

 

Today’s radio interview with Fred Crews on his new Freud book

August 30, 2017 • 9:00 am

If you’re interested in Freud, and want to know what a charlatan he was, you couldn’t do better than listen to Fred Crews on public radio today. Fred, as I’ve mentioned recently (see also here), is the author of the new book Freud: The Making of an Illusion, which shows that from the very outset of his career Freud was a desperately ambitious man, determined at all costs to become famous. To do that, he simply made up stuff (his “theories”) without scientific foundation (e.g., psychoanalysis, including the dogmas of repression, the Oedipus complex, etc.), lied in his works about his “cures”, and engaged in various unsavory practices like giving cocaine to his patients.

Crews, former chair of English at the University of California at Berkeley, will be interviewed from 10-11 a.m. (Pacific time), which is 1-2 p.m. Eastern time, on Michael Krasny’s “Forum” show on KQED radio, a public-access station in Northern California.

Reader JJ, who sent me this notice, said that there is a “listen live” link here, and then the interview will be archived and put here.

Crews is quite eloquent, and though I won’t be around to hear it live, I’m certainly going to listen to the archived version. I recommend you have a listen one way or the other, especially if you are under the delusion that Freud was a revolutionary thinker who created a “scientific” system of curing mental disturbances.