Bill Nye is speaking out against people who deny evolution, saying that their anti-science viewpoint hurts young people and hinders scientific progress.
Nye posted his defense of evolution on the online knowledge forum Big Think, ABC News reported. Since being posted on Thursday, the clip has been viewed more than one million times.
In the clip, the former host of Bill Nye the Science Guy had both praise and criticism for the approach the United States takes to science. While the nation has made some amazing technological innovations, it is also the only place where evolution denial seems to be a popular view, Bill Nye noted.
“People still move to the United States. And that’s largely because of the intellectual capital we have, the general understanding of science,” Bill Nye said in the clip. “When you have a portion of the population that doesn’t believe in that, it holds everybody back, really.”
He goes on to say that evolution is fundamental to all life sciences and biology, and trying to separate it is harmful to all of science. Bill Nye also said that evolution denial makes understanding the world “unbelievably complicated,” the S eattle Post-Intelligencer noted .
“It’s very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates,” Bill Nye said. “You’re just not going to get the right answer. Your whole world is just going to be a mystery instead of an exciting place.”
Nye went on to add:
“Here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but they’re 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.”
Bill Nye has made a political turn as of late, stumping for President Obama in stops throughout New Hampshire. Nye praised Obama’s education policies and made a push to gain support for science and engineering programs.
In his clip, Bill Nye also urged adults not to deny teaching evolution to young students.
“And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them,” Bill Nye said. “We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can — we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.”
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