[Does the BBC Science unit care?]

Language Log, a consortium of
Anglo-phone linguistic scholars
goes off the deep end again over
the rhetoric of science coverage.

Do people even get the later item?
Who members more than the first para?

X-URL: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=184#more-184

[4]Language Log
[8]Parrots and children: still silly season at the BBC
May 23, 2008 @ 11:02 am? Filed by [9]Geoffrey K. Pullum under

Yesterday the BBC [13]published a story (thanks to Sam Tucker for the
reference) about a stray red-tailed African grey parrot that told
police how to find its owner. ....

The story is probably true in outline. No one disputes that parrots
can be trained to do a pretty good acoustic reproduction of a human
utterance. And they will do just as well on an address as on a line
from a children's song or a few verses from the Kor'an; the content
doesn't matter -- for them, there is no content. But a paragraph at
the end of the story reveals that the BBC still brings out its most
gullible writers (or perhaps its most cynical and dishonest writers)
as soon as anything to do with the cognitive or linguistic sciences
comes on the scene. The last para says this:

The African Grey parrot is considered one of the most intelligent
birds and is said by experts to have the cognitive ability of a
six-year-old.

They mean a human of age six. There are people writing purportedly
serious stories for the British Broadcasting Corporation who think
that a grey parrot has the cognitive ability of a normal six year old
human child. Have these people never met a normal six-year-old human
child?
....
Perhaps, as Mark once suggested, at the BBC [14]they just don't care.
For now, I'm inclined to think that the BBC's coverage of science,
especially cognitive and linguistic science, still deserves the
ridicule that has been heaped on it in the past here on Language Log
([15]this post on Language Log Classic offers a sample, and lists a
few other posts on BBC science reporting).

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