Oklahoma Fox station cuts evolution from ‘Cosmos’ by editing only 15 seconds
[Via Crooks and Liars]
In what appeared to be an editing error, a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma managed to remove the only mention of evolution from Sunday night’s Cosmos science documentary by cutting only 15 seconds from the broadcast.The much-anticipated reboot of Carl Sagan’s legendary Cosmos premiered on Sunday with an overview of the history of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the advent of humans.
It wasn’t until the last 10 minutes of the show that host Neil deGrasse Tyson hinted at human evolution.
“We are newcomers to the Cosmos,” he explained. “Our own story only begins on the last night of the cosmic year.”
“Three and a half million years ago, our ancestors — your and mine left these traces,” Tyson said, pointing to footprints. “We stood up and parted ways from them. Once we were standing on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated on the ground. Now, we were free to look up and wonder.”
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I’m cynical enough to think this might not just be an error. And I am not saying this because it is a Fox station, as the are no worse than any other broadcaster.
But they are showing it in a state that outlawed the teaching of evolution at one time and still pushes creationism into its public schools. In fact, the legislature just passed a bill that would pretty much allow any science teacher to teach any piece of stupidity they wanted and not suffer any consequences, specifically mentioning evolution as an area they could say whatever they wanted.
These are just the kind of ignorant people Clarence Darrow discussed in Scopes, the ones who practice the “the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”
How ironic that the first episode of Cosmos dealt exactly with that, the killing of Giordano Bruno. Authoritarians look back with envy to the time when a state could simply kill someone for being a pain in the butt.
A Man With A Ph.D. 