Cosmos with Neil DeGrass Tyson

Maybe we will look like Anime characters!In the Future, Humans Will Look Like Badly Photoshopped Lemurs | PCMag

It has been held at a size that can pass the birth canal without killing the mother or causing brain damage in the child ... which is why I feel it is a product of runaway sexual selection like the peacock tail. Not directly. It is more proportional to the surface area of the brain -- hence the convolutions in the brain surface, the wrinkles that add area inside the same volume.This is pretty typical for primates to maximize brain capacity, but not for all mammals: There is also evidence that Einsteins brain had an extra connection between left and right hemispheres.So further increase in intelligence appears to be limited to more interconnections OR to expanded use of C-section births ... and to specific selection for intelligence rather than just creativity (he makes me laugh ... )

Not just in size but in convolutions. Primates and squirrels apparently have more developed sense of 3-D world due to leaping from branch to branch.Last night I watched the "Inner Monkey" episode and was once again impressed by the detail crammed into just one hour, Lucy and Ardi were the stars of course (and I did miss getting to Turkana Boy after they moved to Homo Habilus, but there is just so much fossil history available to fit it all into the time allotment).And I expect the creatortionistas to be howling again ...Anyone wanting links to online streaming of the (so far) 3 shows see
Watch Your Inner Fish Online | Season 1 (2014) | TV Guide Episode 1: Inner FishEpisode 2: Inner ReptileEpisode 3: Inner Monkey(I believe PBS also has links)

The latest episode from Cosmos was interesting on a different level -- pollution (and global warming) from industrial corporations ... as a by-product of determining the age of the earth.http://www.cosmosontv.com/watch/230227523738How lead in the atmosphere was presented as "normal" until the evidence had accumulated to the point that it was pretty irrational to ignore the poisoning of the atmosphere by the big oil companies ... you know, those ones behind the massive funding of disinformation regarding global climate change (same old same old: kill the planet for the last buck to be made).Rather more political than the previous one, so this should have conservatives in a real knot ... aside from showing the age of the earth to be 4.54 billion years (minimum) ...

Cosmos Wars Episode VII: Heir to the Denialist Empire | National Center for Science Education

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... Tyson started the show with a bang. He pulled apart the layers of the Canyon and showed the moments in Earth’s history that they preserve. The idea of stratigraphy, that the layers of the earth are pages in a history book, deserved more time, but Tyson’s brief exploration of the Grand Canyon was a memorable image and sure to shape how geology teachers present stratigraphy to their lucky students in the future.

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... The research Tyson describes, and the entire field that’s grown out of Patterson’s work, is constantly attacked by young-earth creationists. Tyson’s clear explanation of how we know the Earth is billions of years old will be a thorn in creationists’ sides for decades to come.

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As an aficionado of science denial, I can’t believe I never connected this early work on the age of the Earth with the gasoline industry’s attempts at suppressing Patterson’s finding about the pervasive harm caused by leaded gasoline. The story of the battle against leaded gasoline is a bit more complicated than what the show tells (see, for instance, the discussion of leaded gasoline in the American Experience episode The Poisoner’s Handbook), but the basic structure of the story is not only accurate, but eerily familiar. Patterson’s attempts to measure the age of meteorites and Earth were hindered by widespread contamination of samples with lead residue from gasoline. ...

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Science denial is not healthy or rational. It is very dangerous.ps -- Faith should watch the Grand Canyon part ...

Neither the ToE nor OE geology is science, it's all mental conjurings, so that ought to take care of that problem.Sure I don't mind watching the GC segment. I'm sure it will be illuminating.

If this is the case what is your explanation for them being considered sciences in accademic circles?All the best.

Proto could grow his kids' brains by teaching them another language after the age of first language acquisition but before puberty; that'll convolute them, too Safer than trees, though I'd personally prefer the trees. Learning another language is like taking another lover: Who's got the time?I like Shubin's enthusiastic but matter-of-fact affect: he's just laying out his portrait of our evolutionary past, sketching some of the best evidence. I especially like his inclusion of regular people with relevance to the topic: he explains polydactyly to parents and how our embryonic testes drop and fishes' don't to a fishmonger.Tyson is a bit more...incisive, albeit coolly and urbanely. Throughout the series he's noted suppression of the best science of the day for political and religious reasons. The Patterson story added the hydra of corporate money. The scope of Cosmos gives Tyson a bigger canvas, and I think he's using it well. Of course, he's an intellectually and culturally confident black man, and that will strike many Americans as arrogance. Shubin is cozier.It's great to have them both doing this work. We need more, much more: funny to think that CGI and advances in scientific and popular imaging on all scales might reignite public enthusiasm for science, as they offer visually stunning explanations that let people see what they cannot imagine. Incredulity arguments lose their punch when you've seen it on tv. (More mundanely, I think many people don't know the persuasive power of the fossil record because they simply haven't seen enough of it. My prescription for both better tv and better intellectual times is show and tell more fossils.)Thanks for the reminder. I haven't watched the Inner Monkey yet, although I feel perfectly comfortable with mine.Perfect for a rainy Saturday.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

Delusion.

Genesis and the Gospels are works of fiction. There, we're even.Can we have an evidence-based discussion now?--Percy

But it is only delusional in biology and geology? Why is it biology and and geology where people are delusional?I'm not trying to play a game of 'gotcha', here: I just want to understand your position for concluding biologists and geologists are delusional but other scientist are not.All the best.Edited by Larni, : No reason given.

It's basically the historical science versus experimental science argument that's been argued here many times already, and that Ken Ham argued on the debate with Bill Nye. It's NOT "biologists and geologists" it's only OLD EARTH or "historical" geology, and evolution or "historical" biology, and it's also not just the practitioners of those belief systems but everybody who has been persuaded by them. Geology and biology are otherwise legitimate sciences that do legitimate scientific work.I watched the Grand Canyon segment of Cosmos that RAZD recommended and found it the usual bald assertion of what is nothing but a belief about what happened in the past. He pointed to a Precambrian rock and told us that it represents a period of time a billion years ago when the only living things on the planet were a form of bacteria. Evidence? He didn't happen to mention the evidence but we know that it's the presence of fossils of those bacteria found in that rock. Period.It may suffice as a theory but even as a theory I find it ludicrous that Science identifies a slab of rock laid down in water as a Time Period. Everybody screeches for evidence, but there is no evidence for that theory either. It's all a matter of what makes logical sense and that theory is ludicrous. It's a belief system.Science can prove its theories, science can repeat its studies, science leads to productive results, science harnesses natural phenomena like electricity and puts it to use, science finds medicines and vaccines, Science discovered that germs cause illness and therefore how to avoid it. But all this theorizing about the ancient past leads to nothing of any use whatever, and it cannot be tested or proved.So I suppose everybody's now going to chase the red herrings of the definitions of "theory" and "proof" and give us the usual tiresome pedantic renditions instead of recognizing that I'm using them correctly and usefully in this context. The context is interpretive or historical science versus testable experimental science, and the ludicrousness of the current interpretation of the strata and the fossils, as well as the complete unprovability of the ToE. It's all assertion and bullying, not fact.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And physics, don't forget physics: that bit about radiometric dating methods, all hogwash made up fantasy ...Then there is astronomy with their fantasy about light years and development of stars with the original stars blowing up to make new stars like the sun and the planets like the earth ...Anthropology of course is fantasy with the preposterous claim of true human being descending from apes like chimpanzees ...Paleontology is even worse with pretend relationships of earlier life forms to a common ancestor pool by made up "similarities" in order to force them into an imaginary tree of life ...Genetics is okay as long as they stick to the modern day, but as soon as they go off to talk about nested hierarchies with gibbons and gorilllas it's la la land ...Chemistry is fine as long as they stick to modern day reactions. Talking about reactions in the past is ridiculous because nobody was there to observe it.What have I missed ...? Indeed. What's that German word again? ... ah yes ... Fremdscham ...

You know, I was just wondering about that. If you believe that the earth is 6000 years old, what do you make of the stars and the apparent age of the universe? Do you insist that nothing in the universe is farther away than 6000 light years? How do you explain stars whose life cycle status shows them to be clearly older than ours? When God created the earth, were we joining a show already in progress? Or did God create the magnificent evidence of the universe's size and age just to keep us guessing?I think: head, sand; sand, head.When you write young earth claims broadly across the night sky, they look even more absurd. After all, we're seeing that light now--no historical conjuring or speculation involved.

And we can validate that with the information on distance with SN1987A, and the evidence in the star-light - the adsorption bars of the various elements - show that radioactive decay was occurring there with short age elements being formed and decaying with the same decay rates we see for these elements on earth.It defies reason to think this is not evidence of an old earth. I wonder if Cosmos will discuss this event (they passed one opportunity already with the neutrino detector discussion).Dave Matson Young Earth Additional Topics Supernova » Internet Infidels