Beloved TV scientist Bill Nye has jumped into the culture wars in a new YouTube video where he slams creationists.
In the video for Big Think, titled “Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children,” Nye starts off by saying, “Denial of evolution is unique to the United States,” despite our nation’s technological advancements.
Although not the first to slam creationism, Nye makes it personal by asking adults not to teach their children to deny evolution. “We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.”
The video, published Thursday, has already gotten more than 1.1 million views and has sparked much debate in the comments section and across social media forums.
“When you have a portion of the population that doesn’t believe in that, it holds everybody back,” says the mechanical engineer and television personality most known for his program Bill Nye the Science Guy.
And that is a sizable portion. According to a Gallup poll published in June, 46 percent of Americans believe in “the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” The same poll shows that 32 percent believe in evolution guided by God, and 15 percent believe in atheistic evolution.
“Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology,” Nye asserts in the video. “Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don’t believe in evolution.”
He continues: “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.”
The mainstream scientific community has criticized the idea of creationism since shortly after Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was introduced in 1859. The American Naturalist, a science journal, reported that nearly every major university in the country was teaching evolution by 1880.
The “science guy” concludes the short video by saying, “You know, in another couple of centuries that worldview, I’m sure, will be, it just won’t exist. There’s no evidence for it.”
Click below to watch “Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children.”
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