More Attenborough nonsense

By -
David Attenborough presents himself as a serious naturalist, yet he is willing to narrate a nature film about some raptors preying on some bats by saying:

"The enormous number of bats emerging from the cave defeats the efforts of the raptors, so that most of the bats survive."

He talks as though the bats were the raptors enemy, and the raptors' goal was to wipe out the bats. Of course, the bats are not the raptors' enemy, no more than chickens are humans' enemy, and the raptors no more would like to wipe out bats then we would like to wipe out chickens!

Comments

  1. Ken B10:54 PM

    Some of us are less fond of chickens than you my friend.
    He just keeps coming out with this stuff. I cannot watch most nature documentaries because of all the “balance of nature” stuff — and the endless environmentalist hectoring.


    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more