A Series of Tubes

Radiolab used to be my favorite podcast.  If you have never heard Radiolab, then here is their own description of what their show is about:

“Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we’ll feed it with possibility.”

With that information floating in your head I’m going to move on to my list.  As someone who does not make a ton of money, I personally don’t donate a lot of money.  I don’t have a lot of material needs or wants, so my relative lack of funds does not particularly bother me.  When my birthday or when Christmas rolls around, I’m usually at a loss as to what thingamajig I want.  When constructing a list of desired presents, I usually end up filling it with places I would like money to be donated to instead of stuff I would like to have and then trow away a year later.  Topping the list is usually a donation to Radiolab.  Unfortunately my list will have to remove Radiolab.  But Why?

Here is where Radiolab rubs me the wrong way.  Radiolab will have a show and interview scientists about their research.  The scientists will explain experiments on sleep, probability..whatever(so far so good).  Jad and Robert, the narrators, will try and break down the whole process.  Robert, unfortunately, makes it his mission to blur the boundaries of “science philosophy and human experience”.  Very specifically Robert tries to blur the lines between his personal religious views and science.

This behavior was on full display on a show devoted entirely to a Biblical story where critical thinking gets chucked out the window and personal religious views get barfed in your ear:

Download an MP3 of the Sermon show.

It is a sermon about an immoral act committed in the Old Testament.  Robert tries to turn the attempted murder of Isaac by his father Abraham into some sort of thought provoking incident.  The fact is that it should be a no brainer: don’t kill your innocent son, even if God commands it.  Abraham makes the wrong decision and tries to kill his son.  Even after all of Robert’s attempts to shoehorn in some sort of mental dilemma into the mind of Abraham, an addition to the story that doesn’t occur in the original, the fundamental unethical act of attempted murder remains.  The fact is that the bible doesn’t tell you what Abraham was thinking in the story.  Instead of a distraught and worried Abraham having to decide between the voices in his head and the life of his son (Roberts assesment of the situation), one could just as easily contemplate Abraham’s thoughts as being filled with a gleeful murderous bloodthirsty lust for the crime that God has just given him the moral authority to commit.  There is no evidince of either internal monolouge, only of the situation and of the acts commited.  The moral of the original Bible story, attempted murder of your innocent son because God commands it, is unethical. Robert completely ignores this and instead tries to put a positive shine on the whole matter by inserting a story that he himself makes up.

As you can tell I did not like that particular Sermon/podcast.  The “big issue” that was discussed was not done critically, evidence was ignored, and authorities on the subject of ethics or philosophy were not consulted.  Afterwards I was wondering if Radiolab would continue to operate as usual, as if this Sermon never happened, or if the listening audience would get little old testament interjections into the podcast.  My answer came when I listened to the most recent podcast…specifically at around 12:12:
Download latest podcast MP3

At that portion of the podcast Robert insinuates that prayer can play a statistically significant factor in Stochastic processes.  This is a false statement, and if he asked the researcher he interviewed, I’m fairly certain he would not agree with Robert’s statement.  It wasn’t a big violation, but I was so close to the precipice of not listening to Radiolab after the sermon, that the small prick from Robert’s prayer beliefs interjected into the podcast pushed me over the edge to the land of no Radiolab.

And with that…I moved on.