Episode Blurb from 2011
This episode grew out of a coincidence. I had taped the parts with my kid months ago and never got around to editing the audio. I thought it would become some comparison between Pokemon (good show, good morals, bad science) and BeyBlades (stupid show, but surprisingly interesting in terms of evolution). This week was Science Fair submit-a-project week, and I got to thinking about it again. The coincidence was this article (with audio interviews) in Audubon Magazine:
The unintentional exclusion is not [necessarily] the result of broad policies but of millions of small thoughtless acts accumulating over time. It reminded me of this PNAS article, or one like it, and of a clip I cut from my conversation with Hager a few weeks ago, about one of the sticking points with creationists being the disconnect between micro-evolution (genetic mutations) and macro-evolution (fins into legs, for instance). Big important things (like the War on Terror) should have big important causes (like 9/11), right?
Well, not always. It turn out that the modularity that is so important for BeyBlades is a really good way to solve all sorts of otherwise impossible problems. The bacterial flagellum, a favorite example for creationists of something that is too complicated to evolve, is a modular structure with parts, all of which exist in similar form in other species, used for other purposes. In other words, Big Complicated Things are Made of Smaller Simpler Things. To me this is the #1 lesson of biology.
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But back to the toys. There are tournaments? Well, of course there are.
Here's another whole set of Beyblade videos of kids hacking the environment. Science in action!:
and this one is the hip-hop soundtrack to a commercial for the TV show, which goes back to my "literally anything to sell a toy" rant. There's also a Chipmunks version.
VSI Episode 16