On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 8:14 PM, Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote:
> > 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'm not 100% certain, but are you suggesting the content was prepared to be digested by people such as Orthodox Jews living overseas who have not (either by choice or otherwise) been exposed to the concepts and thus require a grossly simplified version of them? All I can really compare this to would be the BBC's Planet Earth series. During that series, produced on an equally grand scale and geared for international audiences just as you're suggesting Cosmos is, the producers showed life. Here is animal A and here is animal B reacting to animal A (where A could be the male and B could be the female of the same species, or A and B could be two different species), and here is how that impacts where they live, and here is why their life and habitat matter to us. Planet Earth addressed evolution several times throughout the course of the series. And yet, it was interesting, compelling, and informative. People of all ages and backgrounds could watch it and take something away from the experience of having watched it (I know because I used Planet Earth as a teaching tool in a Muslim country and in a Lutheran school in San Diego and it worked on many levels). -- Kevin M. (RPCV) -- -- 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.
