On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 9:44 PM, Kevin M. <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'll always be a fan of Tyson's but I'm not getting the intent of this > series beyond hoping viewers will say, "Hey, look at that." Watching > episode 2 has given me less hope than the 1st installment. > > I can sum up my issue with the show in three words: Lack of evidence. > > I suppose if your name is Cletus and your school doesn't bother with a > science teacher because all you need to know about life is found in the Old > Testament, then you might feel overwhelmed by the ideas found in the 2nd > episode of Cosmos. And maybe Cletus is the intended audience, but for those > of us who made it through junior high biology, we might exert more > brainwave activity watching the professor from Gilligan's Island try to > explain to Ginger how a coconut-powered battery works. > > Instead of hopping into the Mystery Machine or whatever Tyson calls the > silvery doo-dad he flies around in, why not get into detail about who > charted DNA and when and where and how it serves a practical purpose in our > lives? Instead of droning on about what the producers think bacteria and > worms could see, would it have been so bad to include some evidence or > documentation? Yeah, I know, facts are boring and evidence is boring. But > Tyson rails on every talk show (including his own) that facts and evidence > are crucial to science, but for two hours his TV series has lacked them. > > Instead of a CG Greco-Roman museum, when discussing massive volcanos in > Siberia, why isn't Tyson shown in Siberia pointing to physical evidence to > support the claim of the "apocalypse"? > > I don't have anything positive to say about the life-under-Titan segment. > I came away from the second episode with the opposite reaction: I thought it was much better than the first episode. I don't know how much of the mechanics of evolution the average viewer is supposed to know, and we have to take into account that the target audience isn't necessarily American. I lived In Jerusalem in the early nineties and was studying industrial electronics there. A couple of the instructors were Orthodox Jews and I used to talk to them after class as I was in their age group rather than that of the other students. I asked one to help me understand his adherence to the religious viewpoint while understanding the principles behind concepts like automation. He invited me to a seminar, in Hebrew, which would convince me of why I should live a life of prayer and Torah study. I had been invited to similar sessions in English and the people trying to talk me into going were so condescending I found it off-putting. At the seminar, the first speaker said that he was a scientist in France before becoming religious and moving to Israel. He said emphatically that Darwin was dead, meaning irrelevant, and that this has become scientific consensus. I didn't get much else from that weekend but I was curious about what he meant about Darwin and I also realized that I never learned about evolution in any detail in school. I went to the local bookstore and went back into the English section to see what they had. I bought Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker and John Maynard-Smith's The Theory of Evolution. I looked for books making the case against evolution but they didn't have any. I read both of those books and came away less inclined toward a religion-centered world than before. Understanding some of the abstract concepts in the books was difficult. I had to find a few popular science books like A Cartoon Guide to Genetics to figure some of it out. I thought the makers of Cosmos did an excellent job of presenting the abstract concepts in an understandable way. I agree that they could have made some improvements but I don't think they were needed to get the core concepts across. And when the French scientist said that science was no longer taking Darwin seriously, I think he was referring to the punctuated equilibrium dispute. That dispute was about the mechanics and timing of evolutionary change but its proponents never challenged natural selection or the core concepts of evolution. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
