Science Deniers Are Freaking Out About "Cosmos"

**Sagan** · 18 Mar 2014, 6:17pm

By Chris Mooney Mon Mar. 17, 2014

The second episode of "Cosmos" examines evolution, and the interrelatedness of all life on Earth. Fox.

If you think the first episode of the new Fox Cosmos series was controversial (with its relatively minor mentions of climate change, evolution, and the Big Bang), Sunday night's show threw down the gauntlet. Pretty much the entire episode was devoted to the topic of evolution, and the vast profusion of evidence (especially genetic evidence) showing that it is indeed the explanation behind all life on Earth. At one point, host Neil deGrasse Tyson stated it as plainly as you possibly can: "The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact." (You can watch the full episode here.)

Not surprisingly, those who deny the theory of evolution were not happy with this. Indeed, the science denial crowd hasn't been happy with Cosmos in general. Here are some principal lines of attack:

Denying the Big Bang: In the first episode of Cosmos, titled, "Standing Up in the Milky Way," Tyson dons shades just before witnessing the Big Bang. You know, the start of everything. Some creationists, though, don't like the Big Bang; at Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis, a critique of Cosmos asserts that "the big bang model is unable to explain many scientific observations, but this is of course not mentioned."

Alas, this creationist critique seems very poorly timed: A major new scientific discovery, just described in detail in The New York Times, has now provided "smoking gun" evidence for "inflation," a crucial component of our understanding of the stunning happenings just after the Big Bang. Using a special telescope to examine the cosmic microwave background radiation (which has been dubbed the "afterglow" of the Big Bang), researchers at the South Pole detected "direct evidence" of the previously theoretical gravitational waves that are believed to have originated in the Big Bang and caused an incredibly sudden and dramatic inflation of the universe. (For an easy to digest discussion, Phil Plait has more.)

Denying evolution: Sunday's episode of Cosmos was all about evolution. It closely followed the rhetorical strategy of Charles Darwin's world-changing 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, beginning with an example of "artificial selection" by breeders (Darwin used pigeons, Cosmos used domestic dogs) to get us ready to appreciate the far vaster power of natural selection. It employed Darwin's favorite metaphor: The "tree of life," an analogy that helps us see how all organisms are living on different branches of the same hereditary tree. In the episode, Tyson also refuted one of the creationist's favorite canards: The idea that complex organs, like the eye, could not have been produced through evolution.

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marb...mos-neil-tyson

**Koalafan** · 19 Mar 2014, 8:56am

I have to say I got a great amount of joy out of Tyson saying straight up..."evolution happened. It's a fact". This is exactly why I really hope this show reaches a big audience. There seems to be a really disturbing lack of scientific literacy in this country and hopefully this can bring some of it to people who would otherwise dismiss such findings.