Topic Tuesday #87 2014/03/18- "Cosmos"

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, the reboot of the influential 13 episode Cosmos: A Personal Journey by Carl Sagan, has caused quite the stir. The second episode hits evolution, which in the United States in particular is a controversial subject. It shouldn't be, but it goes against the underpinnings of certain faiths. Many people that have chosen faith over fact and have chosen to argue for a few contradictory accounts of the way we got here to even be taught along side the real science of both the age of the Universe and modern biological sciences knowledge of evolution by natural selection. It is a problem here, this denial of science. The first episode of Cosmos' reboot had 15 seconds "accidentally" overdubbed. It just so happens to have lined up perfectly to censor the mention of the origin of life with a news promo by an affiliate station in the west, highlighting some hunting segment.
I will leave the rest of the commentary on how the rather vocal religious to other pundents, who have done a great job highlighting their folly.
Instead, I will leave you with an excerpt of the transcript from 40 minutes (without commercials) into the second show.

"Nobody knows how life got started. Most of the evidence from that time was destroyed by impacts and erosion. Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance; not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers. Maybe someone watching this will be the first to solve the mystery of how life on Earth began." - Narrator, Neil deGrasse Tyson