In the second installment of Cosmos , Neil DeGrasse Tyson tackles the greatest story science has ever told : the story of life .
Tyson begins with the organic evolution of dog from wolves via artificial selection , or if you prefer , the domestication of mankind by dogs . Wolves that were friendlier , tamer and more loyal to humans were selectively spawn to be our companions . As we go down into agrarian communities in the good luck between ice ages , dogs became the partner of our labors , consuming and immerse our trash , defending our territory and helping us hunt .
“ Artificial selection turned the Friedrich August Wolf into the shepherd , ” Tyson tell us before asking the inquiry that has enliven battle in courtroom and classroom since Darwin first posed it in 1859 : “ If artificial selection can reach that much in just a few thousand years , what can natural pick accomplish given 1000000000 of years ? ”
In the Ship of the Imagination , Tyson ingest us on a wild voyage through the genetic code of the ice-skating rink eld bear who pay rise to modern polar bear in a mental process he calls “ the opposite of random . ” He confronts the “ twinge of discomfort ” some might finger at the prompting we are have-to doe with to the apes : “ No one can embarrass you like a relation . ” Of course , it ’s not just the apes . The genes in our body that digest bread are identical to the factor used by plants and insects . And so is each metal money on Earth is coiffure on a gigantic family Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , a real Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree of life .
To take exception the notion that life is simply too complex to have move up out of an aimless process like natural survival of the fittest , Tyson selects one of the favorite chew toy dog of peculiar universe : the human oculus . How is it potential for something so , you will forgive the idiomatic expression , irreducibly complex as the human centre to have arisen from born selection alone ? The story of the eye is told in a split up screen , with the stages of ocular ontogeny shown on the left hand and the ocular area of the eye on the right . With each coevals , slight improvements in heart complex body part result in images that become clearer and clean .
By connect minuscule change in syllable structure to large improvements in performance , Tyson illustrates the inconvenient truth for those who assert the center must be design : everything about the heart , and indeed the quietus of our bodies , shows evidence of incremental improvement occur over multiple generations , not particular creation pass in one generation . Nothing in biology name good sense in light of any other explanation .
In the final segment , Tyson distinguish the five major extinction consequence that threaten spirit on Earth , with special attention to the Permian event , and the function of extremophiles in preserve the tree of sprightliness against catastrophe . He then visit Titan in the Ship of the Imagination and wonder what form of life could survive in a human race of liquid methane ocean and frozen water sight .
Mike Tyson complete the installment by replaying Carl Sagan ’s original40 - 2d line - inspire account of animation on Earth . This callback to Sagan ’s original platform play up the mogul that advanced visual core have brought to Cosmos . More than anything else , the story of life is a visual story , a story of body emerging and re - merging , exchange shape and glide by those shapes down through the eons .
Sagan ’s take may well be the more poetic , but the more literal modernistic graphics of Tyson ’s Cosmos show us that this is not myth or fanciful imagining , not simply a narrative we tell ourselves about the growing of life or a mere notion . Michael Gerald Tyson tell us that evolution is a hypothesis , but what scientific discipline means by possibility is fact . It happened . It ’s as real as gravity . It can be described literally and now fork out literally .
In this episode of Cosmos , we in truth see what Sagan call “ some of the thing atom can do , given a billion years of evolution . ”
Cosmos air on Sunday nights at 9:00 on Fox and Monday night at 10:00 on the National Geographic Channel
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