Educational TV

[quasigeostrophy]

On the Stonehenge documentary we were watching last night, I caught a few statements that did bug me and it's something that seems to be prevalent in a lot of so-called educated television.

Just because a society happened to have human sacrifice as a component, why do the writers and/or the experts who were interviewed give the impression this has to be incongruent with having enough math and engineering to build something like Stonehenge? I got that message loud and clear, and it left me again scratching my head. So a particular society has some major flaw. Does that mean we must be surprised they had any advanced thinking?

It's just one annoyance I have with those kinds of documentaries. A lighter note involves my father, who is staunchly anti-evolution. When I was a kid, when we would be watching some nature program showing a fascinating trait by a particular animal species, he would joke "Of course, until they learned to do that, they all died out." I still pop up with that one a la MST3K at certain times. I don't discount adaptation and other factors to varying degrees, but I don't buy into evolution 100% as proposed by Darwin. No, I don't think the earth is only 6,000 years old, either. There's just something else we're still missing, IMHO.

Comments

surprised they had any advanced thinking

[djinnthespazz.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I suppose some of these rigid fundamentalists must refuse to use the concept of zero, or algebra for that matter, since these concepts came to use from the arabic world...

Re: surprised they had any advanced thinking

[djinnthespazz.livejournal.com]

"...came to us..."
D'oh.

Re: surprised they had any advanced thinking

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

I love the dramatization of the passing on of the concept of zero in one of James Burke's series. I think it was in The Day the Universe Changed. One monk translating for another monk who is writing down in Latin what he's being told:

"Zero"

"Zero? What is that?"

"Nothing. Put a hole."

:-)

Re: surprised they had any advanced thinking

[djinnthespazz.livejournal.com]

James Burke rocks.

[sistercoyote.livejournal.com]

More Information about Evolution than you ever wanted.

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

Aaack! It's an archive off of Usenet. Run away! ;-)

[elmegil.livejournal.com]

I don't buy into evolution 100% as proposed by Darwin.

Neither do most biologists, they've refined it quite a bit since Darwin, and they recognize that there are mechanisms involved that they don't understand :-)

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

I understand and assumed that. The problem is that newer stuff still hasn't worked its way into the television documentaries. It takes a long time to distill scientific developments down to the masses, and I wish I had an answer for how to do it faster.