Saturday Night Radio Drama - Peter Whalley - The Maroon Cortina

 The Maroon Cortina

A few domestic problems mar the birthday celebrations of the Janice Clark - such persistent belief the police seem to have that her son, Alan, murdered his girlfriend. Of course nobody really believes that, certainly not Barry, her husband, who insists it's all a plot to hit back at him. Then her best friend Pauline seems to suspect Janice of playing around with her husband. Ron. and on top of all that none of her guests seem to fancy pizza.

 Cast:
Barry: Don Henderson
Janice: Lynda Rooke
Ron: Geoffrey Hinsuff
Pauline: Kate Fitzgerald
Curtiss: Colin Meredith
Alan: Joe Searby

Directed by Philip Martin BBC Birmingham

What do you mean by a naive concept of genetics?

I'M ESPECIALLY PRESSED for time so here goes. 

Watch these and you probably will be shocked at how much actual observational and experimental science has left behind what you probably learned about biology and evolution in high school and college. 

First and my favorite,  Dr. James Shapiro on What DNA Teaches About Evolution,  his Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture.

Dr. Denis Nobel on Physiology And Evolution. 

Denis Nobel debating Richard Dawkins on the "selfish gene".   This one was especially interesting due to how often when Denis Nobel answered Dawkin's Darwin fundamentalism with either disconfirming evidence based on observation and published experments or the historical and literary record (especially interesting to see Dawkins reduced to try to downgrade the 6th edition Darwin prepared of On The Origin of Species) Dawkins repeated had to plead the authority of old line neo-Darwinist orthodoxy.   

I'm especially busy right now or I'd go into some of what they say in depth.  I will comment that when Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Huxley wasn't mounting his ideological campaign for natural selection and some of its more putrid consequences, when he was actually teaching students he is reported to have stressed the study of physiology and not on evolutionary speculation.  Now that much of what has been speculated about for the past hundred seventy years can actually be seen, it's clear that his seeming instinct about that one thing was right.  Much of what was held to be clear and hard science, especially in the naive view of genes that more than a bit of the neo-Darwinian synthesis is made of,  that turns out to be quite wrong.  

I especially like how even as he lists and presents a huge amount of excellent observational and experimental information relevant to the topic of evolution, James Shapiro stresses how little we actually do know, the implication of how much we do know is that that unknown is enormous as compared to what we do know.  The incredible actions of cells, bacteria, other tiny creatures and plants in relation to DNA and "genes" their repair and manipulation of chromosomes, etc. is bound to be disturbing to an ideological materialist biologist such as Dawkins of Shapiro's frequent opponent Jerry Coyne because it looks ever more that a atoms and molecules up model that has some plausibility under conventional materialist-atheist-scientism, especially as it is stupidly, or, "popularly" presented by conventional science communicators.  I put "popular" in quotes because if there's one thing that has been with a very large, perhaps majority of people it has been unpopular. 

I  will go so far as to say the incredible amount of information transfer, back and forth between molecules and the cells which are the only thing that makes them more than dead and decaying things is bound to cause panic because some kind of intelligence at work where the materialists declare it cannot be is bound to make you ask how it could have all begun without the motivation of an intelligent creator.   Or, to drive you all crazier, Creator.