Science deniers don’t like the new Cosmos series, Chris Mooney reports in Mother Jones.
Well of course they don’t. That’s because it doesn’t go
God made this.
Then God made this.
Then God made this.
[Repeat until it’s time for the commercials]
Mooney gives somewhat thicker detail, such as the reaction to the second episode’s account of natural selection.
Over at the pro-”intelligent design” Discovery Institute, they’re not happy. Senior fellow David Klinghoffer writes that the latest Cosmos episode “[extrapolated] shamelessly, promiscuously from artificial selection (dogs from wolves) to minor stuff like the color of a polar bear’s fur to the development of the human eye.” In a much more elaborate attempted takedown, meanwhile, the institute’s Casey Luskin accuses Tyson and Cosmos of engaging in “attempts to persuade people of both evolutionary scientific views and larger materialistic evolutionary beliefs, not just by the force of the evidence, but by rhetoric and emotion, and especially by leaving out important contrary arguments and evidence.”
Like the ones that carried the day at the Kitzmiller trial??
Oh wait…
Thus far, Cosmos has referred to climate change in each of its two opening episodes, but has not gone into any depth on the matter. Perhaps that’s for a later episode. But in the meantime, it seems some conservatives are already bashing Tyson as a global warming proponent. Writing at the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters blog, Jeffrey Meyer critiques a recent Tyson appearance on Late Night With Seth Myers. “Meyers and deGrasse Tyson chose to take a cheap shot at religious people and claim they don’t believe in science i.e. liberal causes like global warming,” writes Meyer.
Yes, global warming is a liberal cause – we’re all out there with our heat lamps and torches, trying to warm the damn thing up. In our Birkenstocks.