Bill Nye, known as "Bill Nye the Science Guy" for his kids' science show, has come out strongly against parents teaching their children creationism in favor of evolution.
"Denial of evolution is unique to the United States," Nye said. "I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution, and live in
your.... world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in
the universe, that's fine," he says. "But don't make your kids do it
- because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and
taxpayers for the future."
Nye has made several visits to Florida's Space Coast and Kennedy Space Center, Florida. He is also featured in the "Ellen's Energy Adventure" attraction at EPCOT in Walt Disney World which takes guests on a historical journey about the creation and use of energy. The ride alludes to evolution by highlighting the extinction of the dinosaurs followed by the presence of humans.
49 comments:
Up until two years ago I really did not like hearing about evolution from Bill on TV. I always "knew" he was wrong. After actually examining evolution I now realize that evolution did occur and still is.
The literal interpretation of an ancient book is 100% false. It's comical. I'd rather watch Batman.
I am a lifelong Christian. However, anyone who takes the Bible literally (both Old and New Testament), or thinks that it is historically accurate is nuts! The Bible was written by Man, most of whom were inspired by God. I really feel sorry for those who are so, so ignorant to take it literally.
God Bless!
Mozart died before any of us. Thus historians are bolstering the case for evolution. It would be impossible to be a creationist without being an early earth one? Instead of being sensationalist, please learn some logic. You're not helping with sloppy arguments; in fact it could be detrimental in persuading anyone else who doesn't already believe your exact viewpoint already.
I'm proud of you. I was taught that evolution was okay 'to an extent', and after doing my own research, I recently left my church for the same reasons. I wish there were tests for lawmakers sometimes, because their views are sometimes only skin deep. It's a shame we can't have a country that runs on rational thought.
Of course, the title should really be "Bill Nye the science guy"
Evolution is just a way of to make people who don't believe feel better. If we just evolved from some kind of bacteria or apes or whatever you believe then how come it does not occur today? Technically, we could produce a human from a strain of it if that were the case or apes would still be randomly turn human after some time. I'm just glad I have strong enough faith to not be swayed into such faulty evidence.
It does still happen today. It's not something that you can really observe, it happens over the course of millions and millions of years. I think you obviously don't really understand the whole concept behind evolution. You should really read into it more before you make your opinion.
Evolution takes a long time, over hundreds of generations. It's still happening today, but in such small amounts, that you don't notice. Compare species today, with those from thousands of yrs ago. It's slight, but noticeable.
LOL, seriously. Do you not know how silly and uneducated you sound when you take creationism seriously and the bible literally? Puts you on the same level as the radical Muslims that believe in the Jihad and that all non-muslims are evil.
lol this is exactly the type of ignorant thinking that we need not pass on to our children. it's absolutely preposterous to think that we evolved from bacteria in a blink of an eye or even in our lifetime. Reading is fundamental, please educate yourself before you comment and spread your ignorance.
Great laugh at the creationist so they are not only ignorant but also resentful, nice job.
As for evolution no being observable in a life time that's totally false. While it's not constantly observable, even if it's forces are constantly at work. The most observable examples when we force change such as the breed of domesticated animals for certain traits. In the wild you need to look for places where animal populations are under pressure and preferably in small numbers. You would also need to observe an easily changeable trait like color or hair length, traits like number of eyes or number of legs takes much longer.
Not to mention humans being born without appendixes or wisdom teeth! If the elimination of unused organs in the body isn't evolution, I don't know what is!
So where do dinosaurs fit in the evolutionary chain?
Bill Nye says: Hey, everyone, don’t you people realize because I’m a celebrity I can say these things and people will believe me.
Somewhere in between ancient sea creatures and modern day birds.
I love evolutionists who take it as fact, but don't realize that it is technically still a "theory", because even evolutionists can figure out what 'started' the creation of life from inanimate objects. Believe it or not, there are many scientists who are adopting 'creationism' as factual.
Just because a Disney character says something doesn't make it the standard for all in his profession.
It does occur today. Survival of the fittest is the best way to describe it. Over time, certain traits are selected as the weakest or bad traits fail. Last century, a common antibiotic medicine, penicillin was able to cure many common infections . Over time, a few bacteria figured out how to survive in these harsh antibiotic conditions where now, these new resistant varieties explode in population and spread through the population. So scientists, discover new drugs and move on to better antibiotics, which over time, fail again. Rinse, repeat. This race will continue. This happens in all life around the globe, wolves thinning a herd of deer of its weakest members, common bactericidal soaps which actually don't kill bacteria anymore, etc, all of which select stronger specimens as time moves on. Give this a few million years, and yes, big changes occur.
Take an intro biology course. Read some science books or journals, learn about the world and life around you that you see every day. You will see.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Evolution does not address how things came into existence from nothing. There is a "theory" for that called the Big Bang Theory. Evolution is defined as: The gradual development of something, esp. from a simple to a more complex form. In this sense, "Creationism" is not just the theory of how things went from nothing to something, but also the theory that someone just dropped a fully developed human in a garden next to some elephants and other animals. Evolution proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that scenario is completely false. That why it is considered fact.
So many creationists argue that evolution is false because you can't observe it, don't know where it started, why do we still have monkeys, yada yada yada. Let's flip this:
If creationism is real, then why aren't we seeing creatures just spontaneously appearing? One day a purple fish appears in your fish tank where there wasn't one. An entire species of 3-eyed bears suddenly walk the earth with no traceable source.
Evolution has shown to exist through minor variations over thousands of years. I have yet to see a species just appear out of nowhere that have no apparent ancestors or no similarities with any other species.
please educate yourself on the meaning of the word "theory" in a scientific sense. it's not hard either - it's called google.
Because "if creationism is real" as you say, the Bible says the creator rested from his creative works.
Next question?
That's where you're wrong....the isn't "a shadow of a doubt" in the scientific community that creation is false.
And "science-ing up" the definition of the word 'theory' doesn't make it any closer to the word fact.
lol who are these "scientists" that believe without a "shadow of a doubt" that creationism is true? i'm very curious.
Educate yourself. It's called google.
Additionally, evolution virtually ignores the 50 years of theory-questioning research collected on something Darwin knew nothing about - DNA.
LOL 5% percent of scientists according to the Gallup poll believe in creationism - that's hardly the entire scientific community. TRY HARDER.
so you're saying that's it? no more evolution because the creator rested?
You asked about creation, not evolution.
You tell me why there aren't any 3-eyed bears? Wouldn't all the animals evolve that third eye in the back of their head so they'd stop getting shot in the ass by hunters?
And therein lies the problem. You are relying on the Bible. A book, containing other books written by different people. People who we have no idea of knowing whether they were writing factually based on observation, writing complete allegory, or some combination thereof. A book that did not exist as an assembled work until more than three centuries after the events took place when the Council of Nicaea decided to piece together the parts they thought fit in with the current state of the religion. Then the book as been translated and retranslated a number of times over the course of thousands of years. This book is the basis for an argument against something that came from real, modern, quantifiable analyses using the scientific method. The bible would never hold up in a court of law as evidence of anything occuring. A tweet from Snooki has a more reliable basis in fact.
Exactly.
A book that told you the earth was round thousands of years before Pythagoras "discovered" it and told you the earth was hanging upon nothing hundreds of years before Copernicus "figured it out". It even talks about the water cycle 1500 years before the guy credited with "discovering" it did.
But I guess those were input after the fact....is that what the argument is? Of course.
By the way, all those guys above believed in God....just saying...
FYI, belief the Bible is fact and believe in God are two completely different things. Also, the fact that there were people who were no ignorant of certain things chronologically prior to groups of people that were ignorant, does not make it "divine".
rob, the bible tells me that "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth..." I don't know exactly how that explains the spherical nature of earth. oh, and the bible also tells me that the universe was created 6000 years ago....
Not the universe...just man...
I'll leave you with this excerpt from an article I found that shows you believing in evolution is just as much an act of faith as believing in creation is. And by the way, by definition, I'm a scientist(engineer). Ciao!
“Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun,” asserts Professor Richard Dawkins, a prominent evolutionary scientist. Of course, experiments and direct observations prove that the sun is hot. But do experiments and direct observations provide the teaching of evolution with the same undisputed support?
Before answering that question, we need to clear up something. Many scientists have noted that over time, the descendants of living things may change slightly. For example, humans can selectively breed dogs so that eventually the descendants have shorter legs or longer hair than their forebears.* Some scientists attach to such slight changes the term “microevolution.”
However, evolutionists teach that small changes accumulated slowly over billions of years and produced the big changes needed to make fish into amphibians and apelike creatures into men. These proposed big changes are defined as “macroevolution.”
Charles Darwin, for example, taught that the small changes we can observe implied that much bigger changes—which no one has observed—are also possible. He felt that over vast periods of time, some original, so-called simple life-forms slowly evolved—by means of “extremely slight modifications”—into the millions of different forms of life on earth.
To many, this claim sounds reasonable. They wonder, ‘If small changes can occur within a species, why should not evolution produce big changes over long periods of time?’* In reality, though, the teaching of evolution rests on three myths. Consider the following.
Myth 1. Mutations provide the raw materials needed to create new species.
The teaching of macroevolution is built on the claim that mutations—random changes in the genetic code of plants and animals—can produce not only new species but also entirely new families of plants and animals.
The facts. Many characteristics of a plant or an animal are determined by the instructions contained in its genetic code, the blueprints that are wrapped up in the nucleus of each cell.* Researchers have discovered that mutations can produce alterations in the descendants of plants and animals. But do mutations really produce entirely new species? What has a century of study in the field of genetic research revealed?
In the late 1930’s, scientists enthusiastically embraced a new idea. They already thought that natural selection—the process in which the organism best suited to its environment is most likely to survive and breed—could produce new species of plants from random mutations. Therefore, they now assumed that
artificial, or human-guided, selection of mutations should be able to do the same thing but more efficiently. “Euphoria spread among biologists in general and geneticists and breeders in particular,” said Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany.* Why the euphoria? Lönnig, who has spent some 30 years studying mutation genetics in plants, said: “These researchers thought that the time had come to revolutionize the traditional method of breeding plants and animals. They thought that by inducing and selecting favorable mutations, they could produce new and better plants and animals.” In fact, some hoped to produce entirely new species.
Scientists in the United States, Asia, and Europe launched well-funded research programs using methods that promised to speed up evolution. After more than 40 years of intensive research, what were the results? “In spite of an enormous financial expenditure,” says researcher Peter von Sengbusch, “the attempt to cultivate increasingly productive varieties by irradiation [to cause mutations], widely proved to be a failure.” And Lönnig said: “By the 1980’s, the hopes and euphoria among scientists had ended in worldwide failure. Mutation breeding as a separate branch of research was abandoned in Western countries. Almost all the mutants . . . died or were weaker than wild varieties.”*
Even so, the data now gathered from some 100 years of mutation research in general and 70 years of mutation breeding in particular enable scientists to draw conclusions regarding the ability of mutations to produce new species. After examining the evidence, Lönnig concluded: “Mutations cannot transform an original species [of plant or animal] into an entirely new one. This conclusion agrees with all the experiences and results of mutation research of the 20th century taken together as well as with the laws of probability.”
So, can mutations cause one species to evolve into a completely new kind of creature? The evidence answers no! Lönnig’s research has led him to the conclusion that “properly defined species have real boundaries that cannot be abolished or transgressed by accidental mutations.”
Consider the implications of the above facts. If highly trained scientists are unable to produce new species by artificially inducing and selecting favorable mutations, is it likely that an unintelligent process would do a better job? If research shows that mutations cannot transform an original species into an entirely new one, then how, exactly, was macroevolution supposed to have taken place?
Myth 2. Natural selection led to the creation of new species.
Darwin believed that what he called natural selection would favor those life-forms best suited to the environment, whereas less suitable life-forms would eventually die off. Modern evolutionists teach that as species spread and became isolated, natural selection chose the ones with gene mutations that made them capable of surviving in their new environment. As a result, evolutionists speculate, these isolated groups eventually developed into totally new species.
The facts. As previously noted, the evidence from research strongly indicates that mutations cannot produce entirely new kinds of plants or animals. Nevertheless, what proof do evolutionists provide to support the claim that natural selection chooses beneficial mutations to produce new species? A brochure published in 1999 by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in the United States refers to “the 13 species of finches studied by Darwin on the Galápagos Islands, now known as Darwin’s finches.”
In the 1970’s, a research group led by Peter R. and B. Rosemary Grant of Princeton University began studying these finches and discovered that after a year of drought on the islands, finches that had slightly bigger beaks survived more readily than those with smaller beaks. Since observing the size and shape of the beaks is one of the primary ways of determining the 13 species of finches, these findings were assumed to be significant. “The Grants have estimated,” continues the NAS brochure, “that if droughts occur about once every 10 years on the islands, a new species of finch might arise in only about 200 years.”
However, the NAS brochure neglects to mention that in the years following the drought, finches with smaller beaks again dominated the population. The researchers found that as the climatic conditions on the island changed, finches with longer beaks were dominant one year, but later those with smaller beaks were dominant. They also noticed that some of the different “species” of finches were interbreeding and producing offspring that survived better than the parents. They concluded that if the interbreeding continued, it could result in the fusion of two “species” into just one.
So, does natural selection really create entirely new species? Decades ago, evolutionary biologist George Christopher Williams began questioning whether natural selection had such power. In 1999, evolutionary theorist Jeffrey H. Schwartz wrote that natural selection may be helping species adapt to the changing demands of existence, but it is not creating anything new.
Indeed, Darwin’s finches are not becoming “anything new.” They are still finches. And the fact that they are interbreeding casts doubt on the methods some evolutionists use to define a species. In addition, information about these birds exposes the fact that even prestigious scientific academies are not above reporting evidence in a biased manner.
Myth 3. The fossil record documents macroevolutionary changes.
The previously mentioned NAS brochure leaves the reader with the impression that the fossils found by scientists more than adequately document macroevolution. It declares: “So many intermediate forms have been discovered between fish and amphibians, between amphibians and reptiles, between reptiles and mammals, and along the primate lines of descent that it often is difficult to identify categorically when the transition occurs from one to another particular species.”
The facts. The confident statement made by the NAS brochure is quite surprising. Why? Niles Eldredge, a staunch evolutionist, states that the fossil record shows, not that there is a gradual accumulation of change, but that for long periods of time, “little or no evolutionary change accumulates in most species.”*
To date, scientists worldwide have u
nearthed and cataloged some 200 million large fossils and billions of small fossils. Many researchers agree that this vast and detailed record shows that all the major groups of animals appeared suddenly and remained virtually unchanged, with many species disappearing as suddenly as they arrived.
Belief in Evolution—An Act of “Faith”
Why do many prominent evolutionists insist that macroevolution is a fact? Richard Lewontin, an influential evolutionist, candidly wrote that many scientists are willing to accept unproven scientific claims because they “have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.”* Many scientists refuse even to consider the possibility of an intelligent Designer because, as Lewontin writes, “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
In this regard, sociologist Rodney Stark is quoted in Scientific American as saying: “There’s been 200 years of marketing that if you want to be a scientific person you’ve got to keep your mind free of the fetters of religion.” He further notes that in research universities, “the religious people keep their mouths shut.”
If you are to accept the teaching of macroevolution as true, you must believe that agnostic or atheistic scientists will not let their personal beliefs influence their interpretations of scientific findings. You must believe that mutations and natural selection produced all complex life-forms, despite a century of research that shows that mutations have not transformed even one properly defined species into something entirely new. You must believe that all creatures gradually evolved from a common ancestor, despite a fossil record that strongly indicates that the major kinds of plants and animals appeared abruptly and did not evolve into other kinds, even over aeons of time. Does that type of belief sound as though it is based on facts or on myths? Really, belief in evolution is an act of “faith.”
ATTACK OF THE OVERLY LONG POSTS!!!
Deploy the "Don't read that" ray...pew! pew!
PROOF of evolution:
All creationists seem retarded in comparison to normal people.
Your "facts" supporting your arguments are completely false. Speciation has been very widely observed. In a study done by Meffert and Bryant (1991), 100 pairs of housefies have been isolated from a garbage dump, and separated into 6, non-interbreeding groups. They then let them pass through 35 generations, and then found that the flies cannot inbreed anymore. There are literally dozens more observed instances from mosquitoes in the London Underground, speciation of different varieties of corn, to fruit flies regularly being selected for to the point of speciation within laboratories.
In fact, in bacteria, there have been observed instances of bacteria accumulating mutations for enzymes that break down nylon. A SYNTHETIC substance which has never existed on the planet before, and bacteria with fully sequenced genes which in the past did not have the genes required to break down nylon, and now do.
The fossil record indeed does record missing links and intermediate species. You are just mis-interpreting them. Evolution only occurs when the population is not in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, which occurs when they satisfy all of these conditions: No beneficial mutations, Random mating, Large population, No natural selection, No population migration. There is a speed to evolution. The greater a species is out of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the faster it speciates. So if there exists long periods of time with relatively stable conditions, a species will not evolve quickly. The more it is disrupted without eradicating the species entirely, the faster it evolves.
I am a hardcore creationist!!! You know why? Because it is the truth!!!!
To all of you out there who disagree with the REAL science, just answer this question:
Why is evolution just a theory, if it is fact?
Case closed!
Creationists win!
Creationists win!
Creationists win!
PLUS: Don't you evolutionists just find the age of the fossils from by dating the rocks you find around it??? Can’t you all just realize that is circular reasoning?
You would think that there would be better ways of finding the age of fossils by now.
lol ok so where are these so-called "facts" that support creationism then? CASE WIDE OPEN
Fact: The earth is just 6 thousand years old.
Not a fact: Age of fossils reported by “scientists.” See below.
Creationists win yet again!
LOL I'm not going to argue with someone who believes that the earth is 6000 years old. Have fun with your life.
I’m glad to know that last statement of mine was the TKO to your so called argument.
Thanks for pointing out how completely ignorant you are about science. There are (and have been) other ways to determine the age of fossils. Radio-carbon dating for one. Since you obviously don't know about it, it is calculating the half-life decay of naturally occuring radioactive carbon isotopes in various organic substances. I'm not going to spend much more time on this post. It is impossible to make a reasonable argument to someone who operates without reason.
Oh…Wow…I had no idea. I looked up that radio-carbon stuff up on Wikipedia and it appears you did your home work. I guess I was wrong after all. I now believe in evolution. I’m sorry for wasting everyone’s time.
Here in TN, they have taken steps though new legislation to allow creationism back into the classroom. This law turns the clock back nearly 100 years here in the seemingly unprogressive South and is simply embarrassing. There is no argument against the Theory of Evolution other than that of religious doctrine. The Monkey Law only opens the door for fanatic Christianity to creep its way back into our classrooms. You can see my visual response as a Tennessean to this absurd law on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/04/pulpit-in-classroom-biblical-agenda-in.html with some evolutionary art and a little bit of simple logic.
The South is not unprogressive and I believe you have your facts wrong. I believe the law that was passed would allow BOTH THEORIES to be taught to allow the students to discuss analyze and decide which THEORY they believe is more plausible. Perhaps getting your facts straight before opening your mouth would be a good idea. Unless of course you like the taste of your own foot.
Evolution is a scientific theory. Creationism is not.
For all those who do not know what a scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment.
So, how does your foot taste?
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