What the Haters Got Wrong About Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Comments on GMOs

Food and Farm Discussion Lab ^ | August 13, 2014 | Marc Brazeau

[EveningStar]

Like anything relating to GMOs, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s recent off the cuff remarks on GMOs and his exhortation to ‘chill out’ was met with competing choruses of cheers and jeers. I watched the reaction unfurl on his Facebook page and on Chris Mooney’s posts in Mother Jones. These were interesting vantage points for related reasons. Chris Mooney writes about the politics of science and is particularly interested in how political loyalties tend to scramble our brains when it comes to picking and choosing which science we choose to accept (or even understand). Neil deGrasse Tyson is a great champion of the scientific method. So it was especially embarrassing and disconcerting to see their corresponding readers and fans parade through to lodge their disagreement with Tyson’s remarks based on a number of common and easily debunked misconceptions and fallacies.

[martin_fierro]

Obligatory graphic.

[Vaquero]

After his global warming/Marxist anti Catholic romp on Cosmos. I have had just about enough of hammy Mr Tyson. He was better when he commented on 1 cosmological topic on one of the astronomy shows on discovery or history channels.
He jumped the shark nebula.

[aquila48]

I don’t care much for Neil Tyson, but on this one I agree with him.

[Boogieman]

Yeah, even if there might be legitimate concerns about GMOs, they are completely overshadowed by the chorus of nincompoops who have no idea what they are talking about just freaking out about it.

[VanDeKoik]

Seriously cannot stand the guy. Pompous as heck, and undeserving of all of the accolades from his sycophants.

I’ve even seen people put him at the same level as Hawking!

Both he and Bill Nye need to find a black hole to explore.

[Gideon7]

That remake of the Cosmos TV series was awful: The gratuitous bashing of Christianity with its total unhistoricity of Giordano Bruno (he was never persecuted because of his cosmological ideas, it was because of his heretical beliefs that Jesus was merely a magician and not a savior). Just more cheap shots of 'science beats religion!' from the peanut gallery, with childish CGI scenes of Star Wars asteroid fields. All the lazy tropes were on display.

Now, a real honest-to-goodness remake of Cosmos could have been truly wonderful, given all new and exciting things that cosmologists have discovered since the 1980s: dark matter, dark energy, the UDF, the Big Rip, the oceans of Europa, Fermi's Paradox (where are the aliens?), virtual particles, the mystery of the 10 perfect physical constants (why are they all exactly right?), the four forces (why is gravity so weird?). It could have been a celebration of the simple majesty, the sheer elegance, the pure aesthetics, and the grand intelligence behind the design of the universe.

[FredZarguna]

Proving, once again, that the Lefties priding themselves so much on being the scientifically literate branch of the American family tree is so much hogwash, and so often leads to irreconcilable contradictions.

IF there really is a climatological impact from burning fossil fuels, should we not generate energy via the method with the least environmental impact? Sure. OK, that would be nuclear power. Oh, no, can't do that.

IF we need to reduce or eliminate pesticides, should we not do that via the method with the least environmental impact? Sure. OK, that would be GMO's. Oh, no, we can't do that, either.

These morons actually believe that you will cause more harmful mutations by altering crops to produce a target-specific protein than you will by dumping megatons of pesticide [or, if you don't use pesticides, by dumping gigatons of waste-based fertilizer onto much lower yield cropland.] Wrong.

[Las Vegas Dave]

FWIW ping.

The Fermi Paradox seeks to answer the question of where the aliens are. Given that our star and Earth are part of a young planetary system compared to the rest of the universe — and that interstellar travel might be fairly easy to achieve — the theory says that Earth should have been visited by aliens already.

As the story goes, Enrico Fermi (an Italian physicist) first came out with the theory with a casual lunchtime remark in 1950. The implications, however, have had extraterrestrial researchers scratching their heads in the decades since.

“Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire galaxy,” the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) said on its website.

“Within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it’s quite short compared with the age of the galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years. Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise.” - See more at: http://www.ancient-code.com/fermi-paradox/#sthash.JyKbtsiO.dpuf

[Vaquero]

Yup, everything you mentioned and more. (Though the universe is so big for Fermi’s ‘where’ to be a slam dunk yet).