All posts tagged "Neil Degrasse Tyson"

Last week, Adam Weinstein asked on Gawker: Where Is the Humanities' Neil deGrasse Tyson? Coming on the heels of Nick Kristof’s badly-framed and much-derided call for professors to speak more broadly and openly to nonacademic audiences (as if we don’t already do that, every chance we get), Weinstein’s question was easy to misframe and deride. Also, it was on Gawker, so it was all the more tempting for academics to dismiss, as if it were a “which obscure humanist are you?” quiz on Buzzfeed.

Neil deGrasse Tyson toyed with creationist beliefs Sunday night on the latest episode of Cosmos.

Creationist Ray Comfort complained that Neil deGrasse Tyson had misrepresented the Bible.

That disturbance you might have felt Sunday in the fabric of spacetime happened when Neil deGrasse Tyson, in New Mexico filming episodes of Cosmos, spent some time talking with Laurence Fishburne, who happened to be nearby filming an indie sci-fi thriller, The Signal.

The wingnut panic over the show Cosmos is incredibly amusing to me. It's understandable, because Neil deGrasse Tyson is really good at being clear and concise about science and he eviscerates right wing attempts to muddy the waters with precision. I particularly liked this quote from an interview on Inquiring Minds: "I claim that all those who think they can cherry-pick science simply don't understand how science works," because science, unlike theology or musical taste, isn't a matter of just taking what you like and leaving the rest behind. What is interesting---and threatening---about Cosmos is it asserts interconnectedness of science. Evolution and the "big bang" theory are inseparable, and knowing how old and vast the universe is makes it much, much easier to understand how evolution works.

It's hard to believe it's an accident, I'll say that much. The Fox affiliate---not Fox News, but just Fox---in Oklahoma City cut out the last 15 seconds of the airing of the new version of Cosmos featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, which just happened to be when he mentioned that human beings evolved just recently in relation to the universe.