The Royal Society has a podcast on the topic of why Creationism is wrong and Evolutionism is right. An interesting topic, but Steve Jones of University College London who gives the talk engages in rather irritating devices in his talk. He starts off by pretty much dismissing creation myths by belittling them in a straw-man sort of way. This wastes the opportunity to actually engage in any kind of reasonable comparison leading to a proposed conclusion. Additionally, Jones says at the beginning of this talk that one must embrace doubt and uncertainty but seems in his whole talk to do the opposite. Another irritating thing Mr. Jones does is engage in class-based derogatory remarks about the accent used by Prince William. He suggests jokingly that it's hard to understand and that perhaps in a few generations the whole royal family may descend even further in their pronunciation. I had no difficulty in understanding the prince in the clip provided and can't for the life of me grasp what makes his pronunciation any worse than any other accent.
To sum up, what bugged me as I listened to this talk was the use of elitist, exclusionary, and derogatory talk by someone presented as a researcher and thinker of some note. Mr. Jones should have stuck to his main topic of interest. Those bits were interesting.
The Royal Society makes the lecture available as a podcast one but only apparently compatible with Itunes. This fits in well with my sense of them (confirms my prejudice) that they are rather used to keeping and dishing out information in as exclusive a way as possible rather than disseminating it for the good of humanity ASAP. They go back a long time. VanLeeuwenhoek was a member (after waiting a rather long time for membership if I recall). They have apparently made their archives available free but only as a sort of marketing move that will end in less than two months from now. As far as I can tell you can't actually search their archives from the free interface. You have to rely on their glowing writeup which acts as mothering docent to the archives, never letting you just roam and read. May exclusive clubs like this change or wither and die (that's my freedom of information flow curse). In the morning, as they surfed along, they saw the Royal Society archive website had withered from the roots. Apologies to Mark.
