“People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.”

American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. He studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University, and has been director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City since 1996. He was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University from 1991 to 1994, then joined the planetarium as a staff scientist and also taught at Princeton as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. At the American Museum of Natural History, he founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate there since 2003.