In criticizing intelligent design, he points some obvious flaws in the human body. For example, unlike dolphins and whales, we use the same hole to eat, breath, and speak--so inevitably a certain number of people die every year of choking. And no engineer would have created what we have between our legs, which he calls "an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage plant".
An audience member at an appearance asked him what he, lacking belief in god, would do with the knowledge that he is about to be executed. His answer:
I would request that my body, in death, be buried, not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life.
When he speaks he takes command of the subject. He rolls fluently through any thought, often in ten-minute pieces. He is that special kind of mind that produces spontaneous speech as clear and refined as a piece of writing that has been drafted, revised and rewritten.
I'm still mourning the loss of Christopher Hitchens. It hurts to know that there will never be any new material from him. So it is all the more delightful that Neil deGrasse Tyson is among the living.
Meanwhile, I am schlepping through a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I can only report so far that he was smart and said an inspiring thing or two by the time he hit his mid thirties. Otherwise, he is a snooze fest.
(NASA photo via Wikipedia)
