episode changes

[Deledrius]

Don't call it evolution, just call it a mutation. In fact, Trek, never use the term "evolution" in a story again without the approval of a high school science student. This would have saved you some grief come "Dear Doctor."

I don't know how much authority André Bormanis had, but clearly it wasn't enough. He's an astronomer, so there's a bit of working outside his area of expertise, but even so something this basic really would have been nice to get right. If it were up to me, any future Trek shows would have a few different science consultants from different fields (and maybe a good generalist or two) go over the scripts and make sure they don't have idiotic and outright, blatantly wrong science in them. I firmly believe you can tell fun, exciting, interesting scripts without making nonsense up about parts of the universe that we already currently understand. Up until even Discovery, some elements of Trek are stuck in the 1960s' popular understanding of biology, even while they "update" other things that don't really matter.