This runs strongly counter to the conservative approach to science. Conservatives don't want to be perceived as anti-science, so they claim a general support for it and then just suddenly and coincidentally have "reservations" about science that runs against their political interests. So you have people who wouldn't dare dream of saying that physics as a field is wrong, but somehow still manage to convince themselves the that laws of physics are suddenly suspended when they point to the conclusion of man-made climate change. Or they have to accept that sexual reproduction, by its nature, creates descent with modification, but they somehow decide that this can't be true over vast expanses of time. Cosmos makes that kind of cherry-picking hard to pull off. Tyson knows that if you understand, for instance, how dog breeds came to be, you understand evolution and can't reasonably deny that, over much longer periods of time, you could get way, way more genetic diversity through natural selection.
In my post last week about these issues, I asked why Christian fundies are much less interested in building the case against the old-and-vast universe, even though they clearly don't believe in it any more than evolution, than they are trying to sow doubt about evolution. This, even though the age and the size of the universe tend to argue against their god more than even evolution does. I neglected to mention that I suspect the main reason is tradition. The fight between evolutionary biologists and fundies predates many of the theories about the universe and certainly predates the popularization of those theories. It's an arbitrary accident of history. You know, like a lot of evolved features are.
An eyeball isn't a visual system. #Cosmos- Jay W. Richards (@FreemarketJay) March 17, 2014
On eye evolution, the #Cosmos editors again failed to do a Google search: http://t.co/7CE9CTDLcc- Jay W. Richards (@FreemarketJay) March 17, 2014
On #Cosmos, Neil Degrasse Tyson is recapitulating Darwin's non sequitur that artificial selection + time = natural selection.- Jay W. Richards (@FreemarketJay) March 17, 2014
But on the first episode, where Tyson explains that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that there are likely many universes and that we are like a dust speck in Bill Gates' mansion in our relative size to the universe, he had nothing much to say on Twitter. Which is interesting, because the size and age of the universe are much harder to comprehend than the possibility that an eye evolved over a few hundred thousand generations. But that's the point: He isn't interested in comprehending either physics or biology. He is interested in throwing up a few nonsensical claims that supposedly cast doubt on evolution and calling it a day, safe and secure in the knowledge that the fundies he's pandering to won't look or think any further about the issue than to feel comfortable dismissing it out of hand. It's actually kind of weird, if you think about it.
evolution is actually the result of our sun reducing its energy in a cycle? Consider our sun being a magnatar that began losing energy soon after its collapse. The period would be a small slice of time when the magnatar reversed its magnetic polarity. Each reversal would be longer and longer until we arrive at today's when the reversal is actually the dominant form and the small period where the sun has two poles of the same polarity --we think of it as a delay in reversal---is just a shadow of the actual face of the magnatar. That is the magnatar--our sun---originally was a star with a single polarity. As its energy faded, a period began where the star acquired two different polarity, and the cycles of one polarity began to be supplanted by the cycles of two polarity. Could that be the history of Sol?