Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children. Evolution denial unique to US [View all]
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Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children
According to Bill Nye, aka the science guy, if grownups want to deny evolution and live in your world thats completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, thats fine, but dont make your kids do it because we need them.
..."Denial of evolution is unique to the United States. I mean, were the worlds most advanced technologicalI mean, you could say Japanbut generally, the United States is where most of the innovations still happens. People still move to the United States. And thats largely because of the intellectual capital we have, the general understanding of science. When you have a portion of the population that doesnt believe in that, it holds everybody back, really.
Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. Its like, its very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. Youre just not going to get the right answer. Your whole world is just going to be a mystery instead of an exciting place.
As my old professor, Carl Sagan, said, When youre in love you want to tell the world. So, once in a while I get people that reallyor that claimthey dont believe in evolution. And my response generally is Well, why not? Really, why not? Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you dont believe in evolution. I mean, here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but theyre at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.