PBS Forgot to Ask Biologist Richard Sternberg About Cetacean Evolution - Science and Culture Today
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The first episode of the NOVA PBS documentary series Evolution, which aired last night and you can see here, makes it sound like a land animal coming to live full time in the sea is pretty much a breeze. The creature is shown probing cautiously in the water with a forelimb, and almost the next thing you know, we’ve got fully ocean-going cetaceans including dolphins and whales. As biologist Richard Sternberg explains, there simply isn’t enough time for that transition to have occurred through unguided chance mistakes alone, as PBS imagines it. Watch:
They forgot to ask Dr. Sternberg about this problem. The smooth narrative of the documentary is expected to carry the viewer along, not asking any questions. More details of the issue are discussed by Sternberg in my book Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome.
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