Summary Of Cosmos By Neil Degrasse

This episodes of cosmos was a very interesting one. Neil Degrasse starts off with what was suppose to be the means of diversity between humans and animals and he speaks on the topics of natural selection, genetic drift and more to explain why there are so many different breed of creatures and why some are preferred compared to others in certain types of environments. He introduced us to a tree that contained all of the creatures that have been discovered by man, and he tells us the similar physical features that are shared amongst ourselves and those creatures. The part that fascinated me the most is the one that spoke on the topic of the development of eyesight, he used the example of sea creatures to display the complexity of eyesight development.
Later Degrasse takes his audience through a museum, one that contained both extinct and living creatures, I wasn't quite sure what the point of this was because he didn't quite state it, instead he refers to another episode that would thoroughly define its purpose. He also goes deep into a gene molecule and compares the number of atoms in one molecule of DNA to the stars in our galaxy to further explain contents evolution and mutation. Towards the end of this episode Degrasse states that a human is most closely related to apes and chimpanzees, which is something that everyone always just assumed based solely on the physical aspects, but the episode showed that it is proven genetically as well. Another thing about this episode that I found kind of irrelevant was the piece on water bears, he stated that the are toughest animals on earth, it was nice to know but way too much time was spent on this topic that could have been used to pinpoint something else. Besides this minor disagreement, the episode was pretty informative.