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| The Ship of the Imagination skims Titan's methane lakes in "Cosmos" |
Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a clear reverence for Carl Sagan and
the original Cosmos. We saw it in the very first episode when he
reintroduced viewers to the Spaceship of the Imagination, Earth’s stellar
address, and the Cosmic Calendar. The
episode closed with a remembrance of Sagan and a reflection on his importance,
not just to the world of science, but to an individual scientist, Tyson, in
particular. This reverence will be a
good thing if it means that Cosmos
will have the same passion for science and for communicating science. But it can also cause problems when that
reverence leads to the insertion of incidental or ill-explained material into
the narrative.
Sunday night’s episode, “Some of the Things Molecules Do”
had two such problems. First were the
title and the closing line, quoted from the original Cosmos, “some of the things molecules do.” In the second episode of the original Comsos, “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue,”
Sagan went much more in depth into molecules and their roles in the creation
and maintenance of life on our planet.
Tyson, on the other hand, took a much broader view of evolution even
while he was focusing on one particular body part, the eye. The result is that, by the end of the
episode, we really don’t have any conception of what role molecules play in
evolution.
The second problem is related to the first and comes in the
animation used to illustrate human evolution at the end of the episode. This piece of animation was taken directly from Sagan’s Cosmos and was
remarkable for the time. In fact, it was
one of the first representations of computer-generated imagery on
television. But it was part of an
eight-minute segment in which Sagan carefully explained the idea of human
evolution from the very dawn of life to the present day. He also detailed the points at which other
forms of life branched off from our own.
It’s a very important piece of the Cosmos
story, but the 40-second animation is merely the finale to a longer
discussion. To present it here, bereft
of context, strips it of its power.
I may be nitpicking because the first forty minutes of “Some
of the Things Molecules Do” were fantastic.
Like Sagan, Tyson uses an example of artificial selection to demonstrate
the processes of natural selection.
Whereas Sagan used the Heikegani crab*
for his example, Tyson looks at dogs and it’s an extremely compelling
argument. Realizing that the entire
world’s population of dogs is descended from the first domesticated wolves (or
the wolves who first domesticated humans depending on how you look at it) is a
big step in understanding the process of natural selection. Artificial selection, combined with the
discussion of how the eye evolved (a common bugaboo among young-earth creationists)
makes for a very compelling case for evolution.
* The Heikegani is a
species of crab native to Japan. They
are notable for their shell patterns that resemble the faces of Samurai. Some scientists hypothesized that Japanese
fishermen would throw the crab most resembling human faces back into the ocean
out of reverence for the samurai while keeping those that did not resemble
human faces for food or tools, thus artificially selecting for crabs that look
more like humans. This hypothesis has
been questioned, though, in recent years.
The entire episode, in fact, was essentially a 45-minute
exploration of Jeff Goldblum’s famous line from Jurassic Park: “Life finds a way.”
From natural selection to the recovery after extinction events, life
finds a way. It adapts. It survives.
But it survives as something new.
What came before will lay the groundwork for what comes after, but it
will not be the same. And it’s in the
Hall of Extinctions that we first get a hint as to Tyson’s larger argument: We
too are headed for an extinction event.
For there is one hallway, still unnamed, that will one day tell the
story our demise.
This isn’t a concept new to Cosmos. Carl Sagan spoke of
the threat of war and nuclear proliferation in his version, an idea he expanded
upon in his book Pale Blue Dot. “The Earth is the only world known, so far,
to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which
our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the
moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.”
It’s almost a certainty that the extinction event Tyson will warn us about
is the effects of global climate change.
While it would be a disaster for humanity, it’s nice to know that even
if we ruin this planet for ourselves, life will likely find a way.
So thoughts? Comments?
Just want to tell me that my blog sucks?
Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.
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