BBC4 Programme on Metamorphosis

I've just watched a programme entitled Metamorphosis: The Science of Change. The BBC have reached rock bottom. The small amount of real science was swamped by the main theme – that humans can be said to undergo metamorphosis in "the truest broadest sense of the word".

David Malone starts with dark emotive re-imaginings of basic biological processes, giving them overtones of the Alien films. Talking about metamorphosis in sea urchins, he asks a researcher "Does the process bother you?". He describes the life forms of some animals as "overlapping in a disturbing way". He uses the term "shape-shift" and talks of an animal "consuming its own brain". This is all deliberate for what is to come.

After failing to get an obstetrician to describe neonatal changes as metamorphosis, he changes tack and babbles the following pseudo-psychological claptrap. Humans have a deep-seated dread of the process. Even his examples are weak. Jekyll and Hyde is not about metamorphosis, but dual identity. Frogs do not metamorphose into humans in fairy tales – they undergo instantaneous magical transformation.

He repeatedly tries to get scientists to heretically describe soft changes as metamorphosis, until he finally finds one idiosyncratically prepared to use the word for the behavioural changes displayed by some grasshopper species. That's enough for him to claim metamorphosis in humans because "we change our behaviour and respond to our environment". Err… don't all organisms do that, including plants?

It gets worse. He ends up claiming that technology and ideas represent metamorphosis. He is deliberately confusing the scientific and metaphorical meanings and claiming profundity where transparently there is none. The trick is to use "science" in the programme title and liberally sprinkle scientific cameos throughout. But his thrust is drivel from beginning to end. And it is dangerous drivel, because it is quite literally miseducation. The associated webpage claims that similar programmes can be found in the category Factual > Science & Nature > Nature & Environment. I sincerely hope not.

Just imagine what a good science program on metamorphosis would look like.

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