Neil Tyson On The Politics Of Science Denial

Science 2.0 ^ | 9/1/2014 | Hank Campbell

[JimSEA]

Spend any time in American science media and you may find some of them are pretty far out of the political mainstream; so far out, they may not even be friends with anyone who has not always voted the same way as them.

So it's unsurprising that much of science media once perpetuated the claim that 'science votes Democrat.' Humans are fallible and confirmation bias is sneaky. As was apocryphally attributed to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael after the 1972 Presidential election and a Richard M. Nixon landslide victory, "I don't know how Nixon won. No one I know voted for him." (1)

[JimSEA]

Convergent evolution is statistically impossible? Nonsense, if a certain adaptation is helpful for the survival of one species, something very similar is biologically possible and even likely. Dinosaurs in some species had beaks, birds generally have beaks, fish both now extinct and living parrotfish have beaks, even the platypus has a beak. A beak solves feeding problems for many species and has going long into the past. We are all variations on similar biology so it makes sense that species separately or from inherited genes develop beaks. The “statistical impossibility” is silly unless you adopt the 6,000 years limitation.

Stagnant evolution? If it’s not broke, don’t fix it comes to mind. Perfection isn’t the “goal” of evolution survival and propagation is. There are quite a few organisms, both plant and animal in this situation. That’s however not to say that no other species evolved from them. There are some ferns that date back, unchanged since the Carboniferous as well as many newer species. The same is true for horsetails. The fact that a new species evolves from an older species by no means suggests that the old species dies out or otherwise ceases to be. Look up evolution of new species where there is geographical isolation. Hey! Sounds like Darwin’s finches!

Neutral evolution as explained makes utterly no sense from the perspective of what evolution actually says. Perhaps the fact that some mutations that neither help nor harm are passed to descendants if it’s a frequently occurring mutation within the species.

We have inherited the genes for tails and gills though we have no external tail nor gills. They are not turned on, if you will, but are inherited from ancestors in our direct chain that had one or the other.